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UTEST grad Crowdmark profiled in The Globe and Mail article

Crowdmark Logo: Grade BetterCrowdmark, a graduate of the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program’s first cohort, was the focus of a February 17 article by Ivor Tossell, The Globe and Mail‘s technology culture columnist.

Dr. James Colliander, co-founder and CEO of Crowdmark
Dr. James Colliander, co-founder and CEO of Crowdmark.

Created by U of T professor James Colliander, Crowdmark allows educators to quickly and efficiently grade large amounts of tests and exams. Tossell highlighted Crowdmark’s innovation and ease-of-use for the grader. The product is cloud-based, meaning that a team of educators marking the same group of exams don’t have to be in the same room at the same time. Instead, grading can be done remotely.

Tossell spoke with Colliander and Lyssa Neel, Crowdmark’s chief operating officer and a former MI project manager. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

James Colliander, a professor at the University of Toronto, found himself staring at about 5,000 pages of papers from a national math exam. Traditionally, a cadre of markers would sit around a large table for marathon grading sessions, assembly line style, each one tackling the answer to one question before passing it on to the next marker.

Mr. Colliander hacked together an expedient: He scanned the pages into a software framework and distributed them to markers digitally. He was essentially able to parallelize the marking process.

Dr. Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark and former MI project manager.
Dr. Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark and former MI project manager.

“The markers didn’t all have to be in the same place, so they could move much faster,” says Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark, the company that, with Mr. Colliander as CEO, has brought the idea to market.

Crowdmark is an online service that takes the idea of distributed marking and scales it to an institutional level.

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U of T med students participate in mass medical simulation exercise

OtoSim Night revolutionizes how students learn to identify ear pathologies

On Feb. 13, 2013, almost 100 second-year University of Toronto (U of T) medical students participated in an optional, intensive, one-hour otoscopy workshop using the OtoSim — a training and simulation system that is radically changing the way students in Canada and around the world learn this poorly-acquired medical skill.

And, if you want to use simulation technology to change the way medical professionals are taught, ear disease is a good place to start.

Additional photos from this event are posted on OtoSim Inc.’s Flickr account. A longer version of the OtoSim Night at U of T video is also available on the company’s YouTube channel.

“Historically, otoscopy simulation involved looking at an image of an eardrum on a piece of film at the end of a rubber ear,” said Dr. Andrew Sinclair, CEO of OtoSim Inc. “OtoSim™ has a digital image bank that is orders of magnitude more extensive. The instructor can electronically point to areas within the image and confirm that the student sees the pathology of interest. Diagnostic accuracy goes up enormously.”

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Vice-President Joel Liederman to participate in Financial Post’s live chat on Canadian commercialization challenges

Joel Liederman
Joel Liederman, vice-president of Business Development and Physical Sciences at MaRS Innovation

Joel Liederman, MaRS Innovation’s vice-president of Business Development and Physical Sciences, is participating in a live chat on the Financial Post‘s website.

The chat will take place on June 28, 2012 at 2 pm.

Topic: Why Canada can’t do anything with its big ideas

When it comes to academic research and the development or discovery of new concepts or product models, there are few countries in the world that can hold a candle to Canada.

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