2024
August
Chuma Asuzu has been accepted to attend the PDMA Doctoral Consortium in Syracuse
July
Jordan Epp had a poster titled “Configuration Management Strategy for Model-based Product Line Engineering in Aircraft Systems Development” at INCOSE IS2024
July
Meagan Flus presented a paper at the Design Computing and Cognition 2024 conference titled Examining Conflict Patterns in Hackathon Teams: A Case Study. The paper is co-authored by Julianne Attai, Meagan Flus, and Alison Olechowski.
July
Meagan Flus chaired a workshop titled, Transparency and Collaboration: A Workshop on Open Access Design Team Data at the Design Computing and Cognition 2024 conference. Collaborators include Sharon Ferguson (Ready Lab), Yuval Kahlon (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Gregory Litster (UofT), Christopher McComb (Carnegie Mellon), and Alison Olechowski (Ready Lab).
June
Sharon Ferguson accepted an offer to join the Management Science and Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo as an Assistant Professor in 2025
June
Jordan Epp published “Transitioning Towards SysML v2 as a Variability Modeling Language” in Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering
June
Marjan Naghshbandi presented our work “Social Capital and Persistence in Computer Science of Google’s Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) Students” at the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference in Portland. The paper is co-authored by Marjan Naghshbandi, Sharon Ferguson, and Dr. Alison Olechowski.
June
Marjan Naghshbandi won the W. S. Wilson Medal in Industrial Engineering for highest academic standing in the final year of Industrial Engineering
June
Meagan Flus is continuing on for a second year as the Student Director on the Canadian Engineering Education Association Board of Directors
June
Meagan Flus presented a Lightning Talk titled, Unleashing Collaborative Potential: A Case Study of Peer Learning at Hackathons, at the Canadian Engineering Education Association Annual Conference
June
Chuma Asuzu presented “Differences in Consumers’ Interpretations of Novel and Familiar Product Designs: An Exploratory Study of Visual References” at IPDMC 2024 in Dublin
June
Chuma Asuzu and Kathy Cheng had a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management: The Personas of Cloud CAD Collaboration: A Case Study of a Team of CAD Professionals
June
Sharon Ferguson and Alison Olechowski were awarded a research gift from Microsoft’s AI and the New Future of Work program
May-July
This summer, Chuma Asuzu is a visiting student at the Department of Marketing of Goethe University in Frankfurt
May
Undergraduate students Genevieve Beirne, Marjan Naghshbandi, and Avelyn Wong joined Ready Lab for the summer
May
Meagan Flus presented work titled Integrated Co‑design: A novel collaboration framework from the electro‑thermal design process of power electronics systems at the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering International Congress 2024. The paper is co-authored by Omri Tayyara, Ademir Vrolijk, Carlos M. Da Silva, Cristina Amon, and Alison Olechowski.
May
Kathy Cheng won a NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral
May
Sharon Ferguson, Georgia Van De Zande, and Alison Olechowski had a poster presentation “No Risk, No Reward: Towards An Automated Measure of Psychological Safety from Online Communication” at CHI 2024
April
Meagan Flus published a Research Note in the Journal of Engineering Design. Full citation: Lawrie, E., Flus, M, Olechowski, A., Hay, L., Wodehouse, A. 2024. From theory to practice: a roadmap for applying dual‑process theory in design cognition research. Journal of Engineering Design, 1‑21. doi:10.1080/09544828.2024.2336837
April
Alison Olechowski won the Cheryl Regehr UofT Early Career Teaching Award
March
Chuma Asuzu won a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Research Grant in March 2024
2023
November
Meagan Flus was invited to attend Hack the Hackathon 3 in Geneva, Switzerland
October
Kathy Cheng presented at CSCW 2023 in Minneapolis: “In the Age of Collaboration, the Computer-Aided Design Ecosystem is Behind: An Interview Study of Distributed CAD Practice” and “User Perspectives on Branching in Computer-Aided Design”
October
Sharon Ferguson presented “Are We Equal Online?: An Investigation of Gendered Language Patterns and Message Engagement on Enterprise Communication Platforms” at CSCW 2023 in Minneapolis
Alison Olechowski presented a keynote at the Oak Ridge National Lab’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility
August
Alison Olechowski, Tucker Marion, Mohsen Moghaddam, Chris McComb, Kate Fu, and Katja Holtta-Otto host ASME IDETC-CIE 2023 Workshop: Emerging Technologies and Methods for Early Stage Product Design and Development, on August 20, 2023
July
Ademir Vrolijk, Pranav Khanolkar, Meagan Flus, and Chuma Asuzu presented at the 24th International Conference on Engineering Design, 24-28 July 2023, in Bordeaux, France, with Ademir and Meagan achieving the reveiwer’s favorite award.
June
Sharon Ferguson joins Future of Work team at Slack as a doctoral research intern in summer
May
Alison Olechowski and Roger Carrick received Learning & Education Advancement Fund (LEAF) Seed fund for their work “Improving Collaborative Learning Approaches in Computer-Aided Design Project-Based Learning”
May
Lucus Crupi joins Tesla as a battery engineering intern in summer
May
Ainsley Ross-Howe and Alexander Lyakishev joined Ready Lab as summer undergraduate interns
May
Liz DaMaren received the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship – Doctoral award
May
Sharon Ferguson presented her work “Something Borrowed: Exploring the Influence of AI-Generated Explanation Text on the Composition of Human Explanation” at CHI2023 in Hamburg, Germany
April
Alison Olechowki awarded Early Career Teaching Award for demonstrating exceptional classsroom instruction and teaching methods
April
Jordan Epp got accepted into the 2023 Frontiers in Design Representation (FinDeR) Summer School at University of Maryland, US
March
Jordan Epp and Alison Olechowski received the NSERC Alliance Grant (ALLRP) for their research in collaboration with Safran Landing Systems Canada
2022
December
Ademir Vrolijk had his paper “The Opportunists in Innovation Contests: Understanding Who to Attract and How to Attract Them” published in the Research-Technology Management journal
September
Two new graduate students joined the Ready Lab team: Chuma Asuzu and Jordan Epp
Summer
Lab members presented conference papers at a wide variety of conferences, including DRS, DCC, ASME IDETC, CAD Conference, CEEA, ASEE, and INCOSE
August
Ademir Vrolijk had his paper “The Opportunists in Innovation Contests: Understanding Who to Attract and How to Attract Them” accepted to the Research-Technology Management journal
August
Dr. Olechowski presented at a panel during the Onshape Research Symposium on Understanding Collaborative Design with Onshape Analytics
July
Kathy Cheng was awarded a 2022-2023 Ontario Graduate Scholarship
June
Sharon Ferguson, Kathy Cheng, and previous Ready Lab student Lauren Adolphe had their paper “Communication patterns in engineering enterprise social networks: an exploratory analysis using short text topic modelling” published in Design Science
June
The paper written in collaboration with several members of Ready Lab, led by Sharon Ferguson, “’Why couldn’t we do this more often?’: exploring the feasibility of virtual and distributed work in product design engineering”, was published in Research in Engineering Design
June
Ademir Vrolijk joined Ready Lab as a post-doc
May
Meagan Flus and Sharon Ferguson were both awarded NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral program awards, and Liz DaMaren was awarded a NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s program award
2021
October
Dr. Olechowski presented recent work on collaborative CAD at the INFORMS 2021 Annual Meeting, session: Idea to Product to Business
October
Dr. Olechowski and collaborators at RPS Composites receive a MITACS Accelerate grant to support Pranav Khanolkar on the project “A new automated approach for Engineering Design and Manufacturing Specification generation”
August
Dr. Olechowski was a speaker on the signature event panel “The Future of Human-AI Collaboration for Engineering Design” at the Design Automation Conference track at the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.
August
Ready Lab students Kevin Leonardo, Kathy Cheng and Sharon Ferguson presented their work at the ASME IDETC conference.
August
Dr. Olechowski and collaborator Dr. Tucker Marion presented work at the ICED’21 conference.
August
Summer undergraduate researcher Michal Davis won best poster in the Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice category at the 2021 UnERD conference.
August
Sharon Ferguson won Oral Presentation First Place in the Data Analytics, Robotics & AI division at the U of T Engineering Research Conference
July
Kimberly Lai’s paper was awarded “Best Student Paper” at the 2021 INCOSE International Symposium
July
Ready Lab students Kimberly Lai and Eric van Velzen both virtually presented their papers at the 2021 INCOSE International Symposium
July
We had an awesome time running a “Learn to Code” outreach workshop for the teen leaders program of Camp Ooch and Camp Trillium
June
Dr. Olechowski was a panelist on the Mental Health in Engineering webinar hosted by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers
May
Dr. Olechowski delivered keynote presentation at the PTC Digital Transformation in Education Summit: Reimagining Design Education with Cloud CAD which was also featured in this blog article.
February
Dr. Olechowski co-organized Conceptualizing Black Experiences In Engineering Virtual Panel with OSPE and Spin Master
January
Dr. Olechowski received a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grants – Skills and Work in the Digital Economy: “A Modern Canadian Engineering Design Curriculum: Balancing Artificial Intelligence and Human Cognition”
2020
December
Dr. Olechowski and collaborators at Safran Landing Systems receive a MITACS Accelerate grant to study “Integration of Safety Analysis into Model-Based Systems Engineering”
December
Dr. Olechowski co-organized Female Leaders and the Changing Landscape of Engineering with OSPE and Spin Master
December
Dr. Olechowski served on the Program Committee for the inaugural Canadian Design Workshop
