Systems Design Engineering Symposium-day Alumni Lunch and Lecture

Thursday, March 12, 2020 11:30 am - 1:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

NB If you are a student, faculty member or staff member participating in the Capstone Design Symposia, we encourage you to take preventive measures such as avoiding shaking hands and touching your face along with frequent and thorough handwashing as outlined by Health Canada. We will post information about precautionary measures during Capstone events and will provide further spread prevention resources as necessary throughout the symposia.

Please note that external guests have been asked not to attend the symposia this year and are encouraged to instead check out the project abstracts posted online and watch for photos from the events.

All Systems Design Engineering alumni are invited back to campus for our annual Systems Design / Biomedical Engineering lunch, lecture, and capstone design symposium. Like last year, we'll be holding the alumni event and the whole symposium in the brand new Engineering 7 building!


Join us for a complimentary

BME Team 9, 2019 (Min, Pope, Walters and Bell)
lunch, reconnect with the department, and enjoy a cutting-edge research presentation exclusively for Systems Design Engineering alumni. 

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics, will deliver a lecture titled "The Human Side of Robotics: Social Robots as Assistants, Co-workers and Companions". Robots are increasingly being used in application areas that involve close contact with people, often repeated and/or long-term interactions. In such human-robot encounters the novelty effect quickly wears out, and robots need to be able to keep people motivated and engaged in order to have a beneficial role in people's lives. Examples include social robots as assistive or therapeutic tools, as co-workers, or companions on health and care applications. Such application areas involve many issues that traditionally have not been addressed in robotics, but play an important role in other fields of research, e.g. Human-Computer Interaction or social sciences: e.g. user experience, acceptance, trust and how adapt to individual users, their needs and emotional or physiological states. The talk will highlight some of the challenges and opportunities for creating meaningful human-robot interaction with social robots.

Following the lunch and research overview, you are invited to the System Design Capstone Design Symposium, also in the Engineering 7 building, where you can spend the rest of the afternoon (or as much time as you'd like) connecting with current 4th year Systems Design Engineering and Biomedical Engineering students who will be displaying their design projects until 4:00 p.m.

Event program

11:30 a.m. - Arrival, check in and networking
12:00 p.m. - Lunch and update from the Chair of the Department of Systems Design Engineering
12:30 p.m. - Lecture with Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn and Q&A
1:30 p.m. - For those who are interested, view Capstone projects at the SYDE / BME Symposium

Parking: Lot C and Lot Q are available for entry by coin or credit card at a rate of $5 per day.

Note: HST number R119260685