Learning and leading on his feet
It takes brains to tackle the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science’s annual capstone project, but it takes guts to deliberately extend the project well beyond the assignment.
Justin Horst, graduating in computer engineering, did just that this spring, leading a team of four in the project all engineering students work on during their final year.
Horst’s team designed and built a wireless “smart” camera for video surveillance. Then, just for the fun of it, he elected to push the project much, much further. Instead of producing a simple camera with a tracking algorithm, he spearheaded his team’s development of a system that was capable of tracking multiple objects across multiple surveillance systems.
“This meant,” he explains, “that we engineered a network of cameras that can automatically track different people from one camera to the next.”
Before Horst, whose father and two brothers are also engineers, started the project, he didn’t know anything about video processing. “It’s not the field I’m planning to pursue,” he says. That didn’t stop him. As team leader he first learned the project’s practical and theoretical basics, meeting the initial needs of the project, before finally reaching well past the team’s stated goal to implement the massively enhanced design.
Having spent work terms at CAE Inc. and InterDigital as part of Concordia’s co-operative education program, Horst credits the co-op program with helping him learn teamwork skills.
“That’s really what made this successful,” he says. “I had already worked with the people on this project before. The fact that [as co-op students] we all had real-world engineering experience helped a lot.”
With leadership and computer engineering skills like these, it will come as no surprise that Horst has been hired to work on Microsoft’s phone project; he’s moving to their headquarters in Seattle in June.
Related links:
• Concordia's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Concordia's Institute for Co-operative Education
• CAE Inc.
• Interdigital
• Microsoft