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Imagine travelling back to the year 2000 and telling someone that in less than two decades we will carry slim rectangular devices that are connected wirelessly to the world. The devices will have crystal-clear screens and run dozens of computer applications, from banking and financial management programs to fitness monitoring and health games among countless others. And all of these applications will be controlled not by a keyboard or mouse but by tapping and swiping a finger across the device’s interactive display.

Professor Daniel Vogel has received an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science for his proposal to explore the potential for human-computer interaction in fully interactive physio-digital spaces.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Don Cowan along with colleague and research associate Kyle Young received the Award of Merit from the Volunteer Action Centre of Kitchener Waterloo and Area, for developing volunteer-matching software that is used locally, provincially and nationally.

Professor Jesse Hoey and coauthors Tobias Schröder from Potsdam University of Applied Sciences and Kimberly Rogers from Dartmouth College have won two awards for their paper, “Modeling dynamic identities and uncertainty in social interactions: Bayesian affect control theory.”

Supercomputer named after James Wesley (Wes) Graham, a Canadian pioneer in the computing industry, former mathematics professor at the University of Waterloo and father of its world-renown computing program.

photo: Waterloo Region Record

CareerCast.com, a site to search for job opportunities by industry, function and location, has prepared an annual Jobs Rated report for almost three decades. Over those years, the workplace has evolved and changed dramatically, but one trend is clear: as the world becomes ever-more connected, quantitative and drenched in data, careers in computer science will increasingly take centre stage.

The earliest example of cryptography — the study and practice of techniques to make communications secure — is thought to be a section of nonstandard hieroglyphics that was inscribed on the tomb of Khnumhotep II, an Egyptian nobleman who served pharaoh Amenemhat nearly 4,000 years ago.