Future students

Wednesday, June 15, 2022 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

DLS: Tony Chan — A Personal and Historical View of Computational Mathematics

Please note: This DLS presentation will be given in person in DC 1302 and livestreamed over MS Teams.

Tony Chan
President, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Professor, Applied Mathematics and Computational Science

In its modern incarnation, computational mathematics is a discipline that blossomed only after WWII. But even in its relatively brief history, there have been some major shifts in its methodology, emphasis, and applications.

The top computer programming students across Canada and the United States competed in the prestigious North America Championship round of the 2022 International Collegiate Programming Contest hosted by the University of Central Florida from May 26–31, 2022. 

Daekun Kim, a third-year software engineering student, has received the 2022 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Established in 2012, the $1,000 annual award recognizes excellence in research conducted by an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Mathematics.

Professor Shane McIntosh was awarded $140,000 by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Early Researcher Awards program for his proposal titled “Self-sustaining software build systems.” This amount is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing the total funding to $190,000.

As schools moved to a mode of emergency response teaching — ERT — at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effect that remote learning had on students and teachers depended on whether they were in developed or developing countries, a new study shows.

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described the evolutionary relationships between organisms as branches on a tree, a diagrammatic representation of all species that have ever existed connected by common descent.

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species.

Incoming master’s student Sabrina Mokhtari has received a 2022–23 Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence from the Vector Institute. These merit-based scholarships provide $17,500 for one year of full-time study and are awarded to exceptional students who have been admitted into an AI-related master’s program in an Ontario university. 

Ryan Goldade has received the 2021 Alain Fournier Dissertation Award for his thesis titled “Efficient liquid animation: New discretizations for spatially adaptive liquid viscosity and reduced-model two-phase bubbles and inviscid liquids.”

In developing countries, people with substance-abuse issues sometimes face shame and can find it difficult to get help. Now, a research team is using machine learning and anonymized data to get a clearer picture of the underlying factors that influence tendencies to abuse drugs and alcohol.

The research provides a rare insight into a somewhat neglected subject because of social and cultural taboos. The research team hopes their work can eventually make it easier for people to get help.