CMBEC27 Student Paper Competition

November 21-23, 2002
Ottawa, Ontario CANADA

Professor Donald Russell, Carleton University, Chair of the Scientific Program and his review committee had their work cut out for them with the Student Paper Competition at CMBEC27. This year's judging proved to be very challenging as the calibre and range of scientific papers presented were quite outstanding. Approximately 25 papers were submitted by students covering a broad range of categories including: electrophysiology, cardiology, biomechanics, biomaterials, rehabilitation engineering, medical imaging, biomedical signal processing and clinical engineering. Featured below are details of authors who were each judged to have submitted the top three papers:

First place winner of the CMBEC27 Student Paper Competition was Adrian D.C. Chan. The title of his paper was: A MULTI-EXPERT SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEM USING ACOUSTIC AND MYOELECTRIC SIGNAL. Adrian received his BASc. in Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1997 and his MASc in Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto in 1999. At the time his paper was written, Adrian was a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at the University of New Brunswick, researching a multimodal automatic speech recognition system, which uses myoelectric signals. He has since finished his PhD, and in January 2003 began his work as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa, continuing his research in biological signals and multi-expert systems.

Second place winner of this competition was Usha Kuraganti. The title of her paper was: THE EFFECT OF NEURAL DRIVE ON BILATERAL AND UNILATERAL ISOMETRIC KNEE EXTENSIONS. Usha, a professional engineer, is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of New Brunswick. She is enrolled in an inter-disciplinary program through the collaboration of the faculty of kinesiology and the departments of forest engineering and electrical and computer engineering. Her thesis research is investigating the effect of strength training on muscle strength and coactivation in older adults.

Third place winner was Gerry Fung. The title of his paper was: A CIRCUIT MODEL OF SENSORY RECEPTOR FUNCTION. Gerry Fung received a B.Sc.E. degree in Computer Engineering from in 2001 from Queen's University and is currently an M.A.Sc. candidate in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto. In Ottawa, Gerry has worked at Nortel and the National Research Council of Canada. During the summer of 2001, Gerry conducted research on neural network applications at the Helsinki University of Technology. Gerry's current research interests are sensory physiology, human-computer interfaces, computer vision, computer music, and biologically-inspired neural networks.