University of Saskatchewan | Digital Industries

Key facilities

Human-Computer Interaction: Devoted to studies and innovations in how humans interact with the computers that now permeate everyday life.

Compute Canada / WestGrid Initiative: Provides Saskatchewan researchers with access to supercomputers that support and accelerate research into agriculture, water security and other areas important to the province.

Software Research Lab: Co-ordinates digital research to engage and support researchers to apply and develop advanced data-intensive, computational methods and tools to solve real world problems.

Smart Water Systems Laboratory: Develops novel sensors carried on drones to measure snowpacks, ice, open water, flooding, streamflow, soil moisture, wetlands, vegetation and algal growth across Canada.

Radiam: A customizable platform to manage active data, it allows research teams to easily extract data from huge volumes of raw information and efficiently process that data, create new data and share with team members.

Global Water Future’s Core Computer Science project: This cloud platform provides advanced modelling tools to support the integration, visualization and end user functionality of hydrological, water quality and economic models.

Major collaborations

Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research (SWaGUR): Addresses the human interaction with digital information to generate technologies, research and provide training that change how people interact with digital information.

Protein Industries Supercluster: With world-leading expertise in plant genetics and breeding, crop production and processing, and molecular imaging and analysis, the U of S is set to help train hundreds of students—across multiple disciplines—as innovative leaders in the plant-based agri-food sector.

Pheno-informatics: Focuses on digital agriculture and provides infrastructure, tools, and techniques for high-throughput analysis and processing of image data, exploring genotype-phenotype relationships, and shifting towards the future of big data and digital agriculture.

Researchers

Dr. Julita Vassileva, Professor of Computer Science. Focuses on human issues in decentralized software environments, including designing incentive mechanisms to facilitate trust in online communities and social networks.
Dr. Kevin Schneider, Professor of Computer Science & Director, Software Research Lab. Focuses on the challenges of big data and techniques to drive big data usage in a variety of domains, including software development, food security and water security.
Dr. Chanchal Roy, Associate Professor of Computer Science. Focuses on big data software engineering including software maintenance and evolution.
Dr. Safa Kasap, Centennial Enhancement Chair and Distinguished Professor. Focuses on photoconductors for medical imaging applications and new photonic devices.

Special programs and work integrated learning initiatives

Computer Science Professional Internship Program: Undergraduate students have the opportunity to obtain 12 or 16 months of practical “on-the-job” experience with a sponsoring company.
Science Ambassadors Program: The program pairs senior university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students with Aboriginal community schools to support creative and culturally relevant science teaching.
Innovation Enterprise’s AIMday™: Brings together industry and academia to discuss and partner on research challenges identified by industry participants. Webpage: goo.gl/7HQLf9

University-industry research partnerships