Yvonne Coady started working with the CDM while on sabbatical from the University of Victoria, where she is a Professor in Computer Science and the Director of Outreach for the Department. Her students have led her on many adventures, including recent efforts involving building scalable systems for Earth Observation and Urban planning. Support for this work comes from an NSERC Collaborative Research and Development grant with IBM, a Mitacs Accelerate grant with Urthecast, and research grants through MEOPAR and the SALA Lab at UBC.
In addition to systems and software engineering challenges, her group has tackled more contemporary issues of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in applications that require exploratory analytics and modified interfaces. Support for these efforts include an NSERC Discovery grant for deployment tools in distributed clouds, a Mitacs Accelerate grant for context-aware language analysis, a Mitacs Accelerate grant for accessibility-enhanced interfaces, and an NSERC Collaborative Research and Development grant with Ericsson for virtual reality based spatial analytics within data centers. She was also the Primary Investigator on 13 additional industry collaborations funded by NSERC and Mitacs over the last 4 years, and was a recipient of the University of Victoria’s Knowledge Mobilization Award in 2015. She has coauthored over 170 papers with her research group, the MOD(ularity) Squad, won a teaching award, and (co)-supervised over 40 graduate students. Her current research interests include mixed reality systems, citizen science, emerging avenues of advanced modularity across the software stack, and new programming paradigms and future pedagogical directions for immersive applications.
While at the CDM, Yvonne started RAVR (Research in Augmented and Virtual Reality), co-organized SAVR (Software for Augmented and Virtual Reality), and worked on a Virtual Reality installation at the Royal BC Museum built by CDM students called BC Stories. The educational evaluation of this project was profiled in the VRAR Association’s Blog on Education. After that, she decided she never wanted to leave! Yvonne is also the Chief Scientist and Co-founder of PurposeFive, a social enterprise working with purpose-driven organizations to help them scale successfully and promote diversity within executive and technical teams. Though she prefers teaching and applied research over administration, she was once a former Chair of Computer Science at Capilano College, and the first Chair to spend the Department’s full Operating Budget by assembling new desktop machines one piece at a time.
As an adjunct, Yvonne will continue to work on issues of professional education in the context of applied research within the MDM program. Her most recent effort includes co-designing a course for the Indigenous Matriarchs 4 (IM4) project with Loretta Todd and the Basically Good Media Lab at Emily Carr University.