For Students

What is WAT.ai?

WAT.ai is the University of Waterloo's Artificial Intelligence Design Team! We are a member of the Sedra Student Design Centre and the Undergraduate Student Body of the Waterloo AI Institute. Our goal is to establish an environment to grow the future of AI talent at Waterloo.

We provide opportunities for UWaterloo students to engage with AI through applied design projects, educational workshops, and innovative hackathon challenges.

CUCAI 2024

WAT.ai Joins CUCAI 2024! Excited to Showcase Our AI Innovations in Medical AI, Fintech, and More!

Wildfire Hackathon Spring 2024

"We Didn't Start the Fire" won first place at the Wildfire Hackathon 2024.

Winter 2024 Project Showcase

The WAT.ai teams proudly participated in the Winter 2024 Project Showcase, demonstrating their innovative projects in AI.

Cybersecurity Project

The cybersecurity team used the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity's dataset to compare bio-inspired AI algorithms with shallow ML algorithms for IoT device defences.

More Projects

X-Care Project

Leveraging Computer Vision and CNNs to analyze patient x-rays for injury identification and location. Building a Rehabilitation Agent with Generative AI and RAG to support patient recovery while waiting for specialists.

Bug in the Code Project

Bug In The Code Stack is a variant of the Needle In The Haystack benchmark that tests LLMs' debugging skills at longer context sizes. The benchmark generates a large document of Python source code with a syntactic bug inserted within it, and the LLM is tasked with retrieving the bug's location. Through testing 11 different LLMs on the benchmark, we have discovered a correlation between increased context size and degradation in retrieval accuracy and performance disparity between closed-source and open-source models. To learn more, please check out our ArXiv paper.

ZoningLLM

Use GenAI Methods (i.e., RAG) to analyze zoning and construction documents in the Waterloo Region to gain key insights into how to help solve the housing crisis. We are building a web app that uses GenAI Methods to analyze zoning documents in Ontarian cities to gain insights about zoning regulations that help solve the Ontarian housing crisis.

To stay updated on our upcoming events and projects, refer to our Fall 2024 calendar below.

Upcoming Events

SDC Showcase 2024

Come visit WAT.ai in the Sedra Design Centre Student Team Showcase in E5/E7.

WAT.ai Kickoff

Come hear about how to get involved for the Fall 2024 term! We have workshops, projects, and social events throughout the term.

Are you passionate about AI and eager to make an impact? This fall, we're looking for driven individuals to join our team and help us shape the future of AI and we invite you to be a part of it!

Check out the "Apply" section on our website for more openings. The current positions are:

Core Member applications are now open!
Technical Project Manager applications to lead projects open 3 months before the start of a term. For projects starting in Winter 2025, this is October 1 - October 31.
Leadership Applications are open as positions are available. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram for details of when positions are available.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is WAT.AI?

We’re the University of Waterloo's Artificial Intelligence Design Team! WAT.ai is both the Undergraduate Body of the Waterloo A.I. Institute and a member of the Sedra Student Design Centre.

Our goal is to establish an environment to grow the future of AI talent at Waterloo. We offer opportunities to join applied AI research groups, access to educational workshops, and the chance to attend AI conferences.

How can students get involved with us?

The best ways to get involved with the team are through our research projects, workshops, Open Project Challenge, and hackathons.

How do applied projects work?

WAT.ai research projects are led by Technical Project Managers (TPMs) and generally last at least 8 months. Most projects are run hybrid or remote, with no requirement to work in person. Each project typically has 3-10 Core Members. You can see descriptions of our past projects on our website, https://watai.ca/projects.

Projects can be in collaboration with industry or faculty partners, or just for fun! In the past, projects will either publish a paper, attend a conference, produce blog posts, or develop an application.

Do I need prior experience to join a project?

We run projects for all experience levels. Not all of our projects involve building machine-learning models. We also have roles involving ethics and societal impact of AI, user experience and interface design for AI applications, and deployment and infrastructure for ML models.

How do Core Member applications work?

We recruit new members at the start of each term (September, January, May). We put out a general application form where you indicate your interest in our project topics and TPMs will recruit for their particular projects. Keep an eye on our socials for the link to apply.

How do Technical Project Manager applications work?

We recruit TPMs a few months before the start of our project. For Fall projects, TPMs are recruited in June. Keep an eye on our socials for the link to apply.

How can I stay up to date?

Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn, and turn on notifications for our Discord ⁠announcements channel.