A group of UBC Okanagan students has helped create technology that could improve how doctors and scientists detect everything from tumours to wildfires. 

Working under the guidance of Associate Professor Xiaoping Shi from UBCO’s Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, the students designed and tested a system called an adaptive multiple change point energy-based model segmentation (MEBS). 

MIT researchers and collaborators have uncovered a link between properties of graphite and how the material behaves in response to radiation. The findings could lead to more accurate, less destructive ways of predicting the lifespan of graphite materials used in reactors around the world.

The frustration of getting stuck behind a slow vehicle on a remote road is all too familiar to drivers in Pennsylvania, where rural roads make up about 60% of highways. One of the roadway features that addresses this issue are passing zones — dotted sections of two-lane roadways that allow for vehicles to cross into the opposing lane of traffic to pass other vehicles — but are they safe? 

An emerging form of surveillance, “wireless-tapping,” explores the possibility of remotely deciphering conversations from the tiny vibrations produced by a cellphone’s earpiece. With the goal of protecting users’ privacy from potential bad actors, a team of computer science researchers at Penn State demonstrated that transcriptions of phone calls can be generated from radar measurements taken up to three meters, or about 10 feet, from a phone. While accuracy remains limited — around 60% for a vocabulary of up to 10,000 — the findings raise important questions about future privacy risks.