Accolades for the week of January 21
Two of eight grants offered by the Montreal Institute of Structured Finance and Derivatives were earned by Concordians.
Cody Hyndman, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and program director, Mathematical and Computational Finance, together with team members Caroline Hillairet (École Polytechnique in France) and Ying Jiao (from Université Paris Diderot), have received a grant for the research project “Disorderly hedge fund liquidation under asymmetric information and market impact.” The team will study the implications of financial-market participants with different levels of knowledge about the trading strategy of a hedge fund.
Stylianos Perrakis, Lawrence Kryzanowski and Rui Zhong, all from the Department of Finance, Prosper Dovonon, from the Department of Economics, and Université de Montréal’s Michal Czerwonko, won a grant for their project titled, “Derivative Markets Microstructure Studies in price discovery in options and credit default swaps.”
The institute’s mission is to contribute to Montreal’s financial expertise in the fields of derivatives and structured products through training and research projects tailored to industry needs.
Micheline Lanctôt, instructor in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, will receive the Jutra-Hommage during the 16th soirée des Jutras, airing live on March 23, 2014, on ICI Radio-Canada.
Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) earned an honourable mention from the American Ethnological Society’s Sharon Stevens Book Prize. It was written by Kregg Hetherington, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, whose research focuses on how environmental and economic knowledge becomes politicized during periods of rapid social change, creating divergent forms of expertise.
Laurence Miall, communications advisor in the Faculty and Engineering and Computer Science, has written his first book.NeWest will publish Blind Spot in September 2014. The Edmonton Journal’s Michael Hingston, who interviewed Miall for inclusion in an end-of-year list of books to be read in 2014, described the book as a family drama with “lots of sex, and a car crash, and a narrator with a bad attitude.”
A multidisciplinary team of Concordia students won a bronze medal at the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) North American Jamboree. The competition, held last fall at the University of Toronto, attracted some of the best universities in Canada and the United States.
Concordia’s team, comprised of students in biology and computer engineering, was participating for the first time in the competition. The students are Jeremy Glass-Pilon, Lance Lafontaine, Laura Leclerc, Anas Ambri, Melissa Valente Paterno and Gabriel Belmonte. They were supervised by Nawwaf Kharma from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Luc Varin from the Department of Biology, and had help from seven graduate-student advisors.
Liangzhu (Leon) Wang, assistant professor, and his PhD student Cheng-Chun Lin, both from the Department of Building, Civil and Environment Engineering, were awarded the 2013 Best Paper Award from the journal Building and Environment for “Forecasting simulations of indoor environment using data assimilation via an Ensemble Kalman Filter.”
Their paper discussed the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), a data assimilation method originally designed for weather forecasting. Theirs was one of the first-ever applications of this method to the indoor environment. Of 1,300 submissions to the journal in 2013, only three won this award, which is given to papers based on “originality, contributions to the field, quality of presentation, and soundness of the science.”
Master’s student Alexandre Leger won second place among 26 graduate student presenters for his paper titled, “The Myth of the Nuclear Domino: North Korea and its Neighbours.” It was presented at the Conference of Defence Associations’ 16th annual Graduate Student Symposium at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., last fall. The prize-winning paper will be published in the association’s journal.
Marie Dubeau-Labbé, a communication studies student currently on exchange in Melbourne, Australia, is the Canadian winner of the North American Video Competition. “Living in the Land Down Under,” an account of her experience of an exchange student, garnered a prize of $5,000.
The Canadian Bureau for International Education has awarded its Panorama Prize to Accueil Plus for its success as an extraordinary international education program. Accueil Plus is a concerted effort among all 55 Quebec colleges and institutes, 18 universities, the Quebec Ministry of Immigration and Cultural Communities and CRÉ de Montréal (Conférence régionale des élus de Montréal). Within the past five years, Accueil Plus has facilitated the welcoming of 10,000 international students at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.