March 5, 2014
UBC has entered into a ten-year innovation partnership with global wireless device semiconductor company Qualcomm. The partnership, spearheaded by UBC professor Panos Nasiopoulos, lays out pre-defined terms under which Qualcomm can sponsor multiple research projects at UBC.
"We’re delighted to have signed this agreement with UBC and have them as a portfolio partner in our intellectual property investment program," says Qualcomm’s VP of Business IP Strategy Jan Lezny.
March 3, 2014
Globalization has helped increase local supplies of energy-dense food crops, but at a significant cost to global food security and human health, according to a new study by the University of British Columbia, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The comprehensive study of global food supplies thoroughly documents for the first time what experts have long suspected—over the last five decades, human diets around the world have grown increasingly similar by an average of 36 percent.
February 19, 2014
Erich W Vogt, the Canadian nuclear physicist and UBC professor who helped found Canada's national nuclear and particle physics lab and Science World BC, has passed away.
He was the recipient of the Order of Canada, the Order of British Columbia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
"As one of the pioneering founders of the lab, Erich was a huge part of the TRIUMF family as well as that of UBC and the broader physics community around the world," said Jim Hanlon, head of TRIUMF’s Business and Administration Division, in a statement.
February 19, 2014
UBC and international software developer SAP Canada have joined forces to deliver technology workshops for Grade 7 girls at the company’s Vancouver offices.
The GIRLsmarts program, organized by UBC’s Computer Science department, has been active for a decade, but this is the first year it has partnered with industry to hold workshops outside of UBC’s Vancouver campus. The move allows participants to experience a real world technology environment.
February 17, 2014
Challenging a long held view that low levels of atmospheric oxygen prevented the evolution of animals, new findings show that primitive animals can survive under extremely low oxygen conditions, according to researchers at the University of British Columbia, the University of Southern Denmark, and the California Institute of Technology.
February 13, 2014
University of British Columbia scientists have found for the first time an infectious form of the cat parasite
Toxoplasma gondii in western Arctic Beluga, prompting a call for caution for the Inuit people who eat whale meat.
The same team discovered a new strain of the parasite
Sarcocystis, previously sequestered in the icy north, that is responsible for killing 406 grey seals in the north Atlantic in 2012.
February 11, 2014
The University of British Columbia celebrates the significant increase in federal government support for research announced today in Budget 2014, in particular the creation of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.
Announced by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty as part of the budget tabled today in Parliament, the $1.5 billion, ten-year commitment to the Canada First Research Excellence Fund marks the beginning of a concerted national effort to propel top performing institutions onto the world stage.
February 3, 2014
UBC computer scientist Kevin Leyton-Brown is one of six Canadian researchers awarded an EWR Steacie Memorial Fellowship today, valued at more than $250,000.
February 3, 2014
A Canadian team including UBC physicist Walter Hardy and TRIUMF researchers have won the NSERC John C Polanyi Award for their work in creating, capturing and characterizing the antihydrogen atom.
The award "honours an individual or team whose Canadian-based research has led to a recent outstanding advance in the natural sciences or engineering" and recognizes the "seamless collaboration among the multidisciplinary team, their mastery of multiple technologies, and their tight integration with the international collaboration" based at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
January 31, 2014
When David Lowe first wrote a computer algorithm to identify objects in images, he never envisioned it popping up on nearly half a million iPhones and in supermarket checkout lines.
But since its research publication in 1999, the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm, developed by Lowe, has been licensed by more than 20 companies, making it the most widely adopted invention in University of British Columbia history.
