ExCESS organizes academic lectures touching on a variety of topics such as nanophotonics, optics, and microelectronics. These lectures are either given by a professor or a graduate student in the specific field. The goal of these lectures is to provide information that is of interest for our students, in a non-classroom atmosphere.

Upcoming Lecture:

To be posted soon...

 

Past Lectures:

March 2nd 2005: Want to know where technology will be heading over the next few years by Shawn Chance

Shawn Chance aka "The Gadget Man", who focused on Tablet PCs, GPS, SPOT watches, Media Center PCs and Web Services among other "gadgets". The lecture was about the upcoming trends in technology, what technologies have worked and which haven't. Some of the newest technological innovations and gadgets available on the market were discussed to get a better idea of where technology is heading over the next few years.

January 19th, 2005: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and ApplicationsProfessor by Rick Rose, PhD

Continuing advances in the field of automatic speech recognition (ASR) have lead to new mechanisms for human-machine interaction and new means for the interpretation and understanding of multimedia information. ASR is the core technology that underlies systems for human-machine dialog, automatic dictation, transcription of multimedia broadcasts, and human-computer interfaces on a growing array of mobile devices.  

This seminar introduced these applications.  It attempted to summarize the state of the art in ASR and compare performance of these automatic systems with human performance on similar tasks. Finally, formalisms that underly exisiting ASR technology were discussed. In addition, Prof. Rose discussed how these methods relate to human speech production and speech perception.

January 12, 2005: Web Development for your career using ASP.NET by Anthony Vranic

This two hour training session will focus on web development and the new features in Whidbey, the next version of Visual Studio. All attendees will be provided with full access to the examples and slides used for this presentation. At this event, you will also have an opportunity to learn about job opportunities in the industry and at Microsoft. Bring copies of your resume to drop off.

November 18, 2004: Mobile Development with .NET : How to program for those cool Pocket PC and SmartPhones devices by Guy Barrette

This session explored the fundamentals of the Microsoft mobile platform and the .NET Compact Framework. After a brief introduction to the platform, the development of managed .NET applications using C# or Visual Basic .NET using Visual Studio 2003 was shown.

November 1, 2004: Microsoft/ExCESS Presentation on Game Development by Anthony Vranic, Microsoft Academic Developer Specialist

This was the first joint Microsoft-ExCESS Academic lecture. The focus was on game development basics using C# and Managed DirectX to build a 3D game.

September 27, 2004: MECC/ExCESS Career Paths Panel by Various speakers

The purpose of this panel discussion was bring engineers from industry to talk about their experiences and how they got to where they are. Representatives from Oracle, Hydro-Quebec, Teradyne, Nortel Networks, Electronic Arts, and Matrox discussed their career paths.

September 30, 2003: ECSE: Many Paths to Success by Fred Nabki (RFIC), Dominic Pudo (TSP), Jerome Pasquero(CIM)

The goal of this Academic Lecture was to provide Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering students with information regarding the different research areas at McGill University. Representatives for each of the labs gave a small presentation describing the field and research facilities. View the presentation slides here: Photonics Group, Telecommunications and Signal Processing, Power Engineering,Center for Intelligent Machines