Mary Valdes has been awarded a CONICYT scholarship. This scholarship is offered by the ministry of education of Chile and gives students an opportunity to pursue their studies abroad.

Tell me about yourself, where we you were before studying at Telfer?

I started teaching in the Universidad Católica del Norte in 2013 as a part-time professor, and in 2014 I was offered an assistant professor position. I am now enrolled in the Phd program at Telfer which will help me improve my abilities as professor and researcher. 

What are your research interests? What will you be working on for your thesis?

My research interest combines two subjects: accounting and the Chilean mining industry. My research thesis will be related to accounting in small- and medium-sized firms in the Chilean mining sector.

Why did you choose the Telfer School of Management?

I first decided to come to Canada due to it mining local industry. Afterwards, I did a review of accounting programs and professors in all top universities. The Telfer program was one of my favorites from the beginning. I then met my potential supervisors in the universities where I was accepted, and I am very pleased to be here and study under the subversion of Professor Cheryl McWatters. 

On October 3, 2017, the Telfer Health Transformation Exchange hosted their second event of the year and were pleased to welcome guest speaker Senator Kevin Ogilvie. The speaker discussed Canada’s current healthcare system situation and presented his assessment of possible ways to improve it.

Senator Ogilvie advocated for systemic changes in the delivery and access to health services, including considering solutions that work in other OECD countries. During the talk, he provided numerous examples to illustrate which parts of the Canadian healthcare system do not work as they should. In conclusion, Senator Ogilvie stated that he is a firm believer in Canada’s ability to transform its healthcare system and that the technological innovation that we witness will be one of the main drivers of this transformation. There was a dynamic discussion from all points of the spectrum of opinions from around 100 participants.

We thank everyone for making this event successful, and we are looking forward to see you in 2018.

Professor Bijan Raahemi from the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa has been awarded a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to design, verify and analyze algorithms in the areas of healthcare, corporate finance, and engineering.

Professor Raahemi will work with high dimensional data, where the data is described using a wide range of attributes. To put it into perspective, high dimensional data is all of the information that Facebook, for example, gather about its users; from their demographics, gender to their interests, travels, and interactions with other users.

Professor Raahemi will create and test algorithms to discover anomalies in this high dimensional data. ‘‘When we look for anomaly, we search for something that is not statistically the same as the majority of data, meaning that it does not fit “normal” patterns. If you see a data point that exhibits different behaviour than the majority of data, you found an anomaly’’ specifies professor Raahemi. Detecting anomaly in high-dimensional data especially in the presence of noise is an important problem and it represents a challenge in real-life situations.

In the field of healthcare, population health will be the focus of professor Raahemi’s program where he will try to monitor what is going on with a disease spreading. For example ‘‘with big data we can monitor the characteristic of flu season, how it is spreading, for how long and, where it is going’’ explains professor Raahemi. Another interesting application is to analyze vital signals collected from patients including temperature, heartbeat, blood pressure, and ECG signals for anomaly detection. The data will be collected from various sensors in real time and stored in a cloud.

In the corporate finance area, professor Raahemi will look for the anomalies manifesting as fraudulent financial transactions. Fraudulent activities have been a major concern for banks as they impact the bottom line and also are inconvenient for bank’s customers when their credit card or debit card are “hacked” and used for unauthorized purchases.

The third area that professor Raahemi will explore is engineering, more specifically the Internet traffic. The amount of traffic on the Internet on a daily basis is incredibly high and hackers can cripple businesses and organizations by attacking their websites with so much traffic that it becomes unresponsive and shuts down. Professor Raahemi wants to create an algorithm that will help shield business and organizations from these attacks.

This innovative research program will enable Professor Raahemi to explore new and more efficient algorithms that will help us to better manage population health hazards, will make us more secure from online fraudsters, and will help organizations and business to take full potential of the Internet connectivity. 

On September 29^th, the Sprott School of Business hosted the ‘‘Two Cities, Curious Minds: Graduate Research at Three Universities – National Capital Region Thesis Competition and Poster Session’’ event. This joint event between the Telfer School of Management, the Sprott School of Business and the Université du Québec en Outaouais highlighted the graduate students` research.

The event featured keynote speaker Ann Langley, Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic and Professor of Management at HEC Montreal. She shared with the audience her experience of discovering self-identity as a management researcher and academic. Discover who you are, know what you want and be aware of your options was her advice to graduate students.

The event also featured a thesis competition, in which 9 students from all 3 management schools had 10 minutes to present their current research in a creative way. Selected students also had the opportunity to showcase their research projects through a poster competition.

Congratulations to the winners:

Thesis competition:

• 1^st place: Wassim El-Kass, PhD student, Information Science and Technologie, Université du Québec en Outaouais
• 2^nd place: Dora (Yun) Wang, PhD student, Marketing and Information Studies, Management Program, Sprott School of Business
• 3^rd place: Alexander Chung, PhD Student, Management (Health Systems), Telfer School of Management

Poster competition:

• Monika Jasinska, MSc student, Health Systems Management, Telfer School of Management