By Lin Moody
Luis Barba-Flores, a Carleton University PhD student in the School of Computer Science, has been awarded a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) valued at $50,000 in each year for three years.
As a cotutelle student, Barba-Flores is studying and researching at both Carleton and the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels. Upon graduation, he will receive two diplomas recognizing his PhD degree. He obtained his master’s degree in Mexico City at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
The award came as “an amazing surprise”, says Barba-Flores. “The grant will allow me to focus 100 per cent on my research and not worry about finding financial support. Furthermore, as I am currently enrolled in a cotutelle program, I have collaborations with several research groups in Europe. The Vanier scholarship will provide me with the means necessary to visit them and continue developing the ongoing projects we have.”
His research and projects involve creating mathematical models to help solve real-life problems. “We study their properties and come up with a ‘recipe’ that a computer can follow to find the solution, i.e., an algorithm. We are interested in designing algorithms that compute a solution as fast as possible.”
Barba-Flores works mainly with geometric problems that involve the position and relative location of objects in a specific space. “For example, we could ask for the optimal placement of a new group of stores given that we know the position of the clients. In this case, our objective is that no client would travel a long distance to reach a store,” explains Barba-Flores. “Problems of this sort are often present in the industry. However, it is only recently that people have started to look at mathematics and computer science in order to find optimal solutions.”
Barba-Flores says that being at Carleton has been extremely productive and enjoyable. “Even though I have worked with several research groups, I believe that the Computational Geometry group at Carleton exceeds them all because, besides being very strong, it provides a friendly environment in which new ideas are always welcome. On top of that, Carleton has several high-quality lecturers in the field of computer science.”
At Carleton, he is being supervised by Professors Prosenjit Bose, Pat Morin and Vida Dujmovic.
Says Prof. Bose: “The main reason we were able to attract such an outstanding student as Luis is because the Computational Geometry group in the School of Computer Science is the largest and one of the strongest such groups in the world.”
Introduced in the 2008 federal budget, the CGS program was created to strengthen Canada’s ability to attract and retain the world’s top doctoral students.
Nominees are evaluated on academic excellence, research potential and leadership ability.
More details about Carleton’s cotutelle policy are available here.
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Carleton University
613-520-2600, ext. 1391
613-355-0336
christopher_cline@carleton.ca