We're delighted to be hosting the 2025 Symposium for the Canadian Robotics Council at the Isabel Bader Centre. We are working on the details and will post program and registration information here soon. Pencil the date in your calendars!

We are hosting our annual Robotics and AI Symposium (RAIS2025) on October 10, 2025. We will have more details soon. Pencil the date in your calendars!

 

Join us for this talk by Dr. Karen Rudie, our Director. She will explain her research work in discrete-event systems and how it applies to secrecy and security applications. This talk is open to the public.

Secrecy and Security in Discrete-Event Systems

The control theory of discrete-event systems (DESs) is a modeling framework for capturing the ordering of events or actions. Discrete-event systems modeling can be complementary to traditional continuous-time systems modeling or can be used alongside or in concert with continuous-time modeling in hybrid systems. Since decision-making is tantamount to prescribing which actions should or should not happen or which actions should happen before others, the body of work in DES theory is well-positioned to allow us to tackle security problems in cyber-physical systems. In this talk we present different approaches in DES control theory that address various problems in the security of systems and networks. In particular, we examine the notion of opacity, which is the property of ensuring that secret states or secret sequences of events are not discernible from non-secret states or events to a hostile agent. We also look at cases where systems are attacked by adversarial agents that manipulate sensor outputs (i.e., event occurrences generated by a plant) so that a supervisor (i.e., a DES controller) is fooled into thinking the system is in some state that it is not in. We discuss the challenges of modeling security and secrecy problems using discrete-event systems.

Please join us for this seminar as Dr. Hashima Hasan walks through her personal journey as a senior scientist on major NASA projects around developing and launching the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. This event is open to everyone in the Queen's community. Seating is limited so please arrive early to secure a seat.

Please join us for this fireside chat with Dr. Hashima Hasan to chat about her personal experiences as a female scientist in a male dominated industry. The talk will be hosted by Dr. Heidi Ploeg, Chair of Women in Engineering for Smith Engineering as well as Ruby Sinclair, a student in Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

Seating is limited in our space in Mitchell Hall, Room 395, so please arrive early to secure a seat.

Abstract

Robotic methods for environmental monitoring have been in development for many years. Getting to market has been challenging, not only due to the demands for equipment performance and reliability but also keeping costs contained. In this talk, Dr. Mike Lipsett will describe how research results were brought to commercial implementation by a company founded by his former students. Technical aspects of commercializations as well as the realities of a start up will be discussed.

Speaker

Micheal Lipsett
Professor, Dept. Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta

Michael Lipsett is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, with a PhD in robotics from Queen’s University. He currently holds the Poole Chair in Management for Engineers; and he is Director of Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship programs for the Faculty of Engineering. Mike has held technical and leadership roles in several Canadian energy companies. His research interests are the reliability and sustainability of integrated energy operations, transportation systems, and other complex systems, with a focus on robotics and automation for inspection and diagnostics, and applications of machine learning for asset integrity management. He teaches in the areas of engineering design, engineering economics, computer modeling of engineering systems, operations management, and entrepreneurship. Mike is part of two startups, one related to robotics for industrial environmental monitoring, and the other related to satellite-based remote sensing for asset management and smart agriculture. Dr. Lipsett is a registered professional engineer in Alberta.

Abstract

6G wireless systems are expected to offer ubiquitous connectivity in presently under-served areas, potentially provided by satellite- and space-based internet-of-things applications. In the search for enabling technologies to achieve these expectations, molecular communication is an important alternative to conventional electromagnetic based wireless communication. In this talk, we give a brief introduction to molecular communication, and discuss how it may be used to communicate in "wave-denied" environments, where connectivity is desired but wireless cannot be used. We also show that molecular communication can achieve surprisingly high information rates, theoretically unlimited and practically in the gigabit-per-second range, making it a compelling technology for 6G. We finish with a discussion of the current state of the field and propose some experimental next steps.

Speaker

Prof. Andrew Eckford
Associate Professor, Dept. of EECS, York University
Senior Fellow, Massey College
http://eckfordlab.org/

Andrew Eckford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University, Toronto, Ontario. His research interests include the application of information theory to biology, and the design of communication systems using molecular and biological techniques. His research has been covered in media including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and IEEE Spectrum. His research received the 2015 IET Communications Innovation Award, and was a finalist for the 2014 Bell Labs Prize. He is also a co-author of the textbook Molecular Communication, published by Cambridge University Press.

This seminar is open to the general public with free admission, pizza and refreshments.
For more information, please contact Dr. François Chan, chan-f@rmc.ca