David Staples: Did the Earth move for you? Irene Cheng's team can measure it from space

The breathtaking change in computer science can be seen in the shifting focus of University of Alberta computer scientist Irene Cheng over her career.
Cheng started her work in computing science in the early 1990s, before the days of Google or even AltaVista and WebCrawler. Her then-cutting-edge research was to develop a search engine and algorithm that could take a databank of digitized images and find the image that best matched an individual search.
These days Cheng is involved in a new kind