Monday, September 14, 2015

A Welcome for all Warriors

A message from Orientation.

As we all get ready to welcome students to campus today, we would like to thank all of the student volunteers, staff and faculty that supported Orientation last week. We couldn’t have welcomed over 9,000 new students without the help of the entire campus community.

Orientation officially wrapped up on Saturday with a successful Black and Gold Day carnival and a women’s rugby game against Western.

Welcome events

The Federation of Students kicks off their Fall Welcome Week today and will be hosting events through to Friday. These student volunteer-run events include Sex Toy Bingo, a Warrior Breakfast and the President and Senior Staff Lunch. New this year, Co-op Connection (a Feds’ service) will be hosting a special Bomber Wednesday in Toronto for students on co-op terms in the GTA. To cap off the week, Shawn Hook and Sonreal will be performing on September 17 in the PAC.

All activities during the week are free for undergraduate students. More information is available on the Feds Facebook page, and on Feds.ca.

The Graduate Student Association’s (GSA) Fall Welcome Week also starts today and includes a Trivia Night, Free Food Thursday and a Welcome Back Pub Night. The GSA executives invite all graduate students out to the GSA Social on Wednesday to meet the councillors and share feedback around the graduate student experience.

All activities during the week are free for graduate students. More information is available on the Graduate House’s website. 

Changes to minimum wage rates coming

"The Ontario government has announced changes to the minimum wage rates effective October 1^st 2015, including an increase for the general minimum wage rate from $11 to $11.25 per hour," says a notice from Human Resources.

"Information is located on the Human Resources website including a link to the government’s website. The majority of our employees are not impacted by this change; however, there may be some employees where attention will be required by managers to ensure compliance.

Please direct any questions to the Human Resources department at: hrhelp@uwaterloo.ca."

Manager for Quality Assurance named

The Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic has recently hired a Manager for Quality Assurance.

“Waterloo’s strategic plan has “outstanding academic programming” as one of its eight themes,” says a memo circulated by Associate Vice-President, Academic Mario Coniglio and Associate Provost, Graduate Studies Jim Frank. “As part of our commitment to ensure Waterloo continues to provide excellent undergraduate and graduate programs, an initiative funded for roll-out this year is to support the quality assurance process for academic programs, through the hiring of a manager for Quality Assurance.”

“We are pleased to announce that Amanda McKenzie is taking on this responsibility, as she continues to manage the Office of Academic Integrity,” the memo continues.

The Ontario Universities Council on Quality Assurance (Quality Council) oversees quality assurance of academic programs at the province’s universities. At the local level, Waterloo is guided in the quality assurance process through its Institutional Quality Assurance Process (IQAP) document, which was recently re-ratified by the Quality Council. At Waterloo, quality assurance is part of the mandate of the Associate Vice-President, Academic for undergraduate programs, and the Associate Provost, Graduate Studies for graduate programs.

“Amanda’s work will initially focus on program reviews currently being handled in the Associate Vice-President, Academic Office, and she will collaborate with the Graduate Studies Office for graduate and augmented (combined undergraduate and graduate) reviews,” the memo states. “Amanda will be responsible for the oversight of all internal processes and communications related to development (planning, execution and reporting) of new undergraduate academic programs (degree and non-degree) and the scheduled cyclical review of existing undergraduate academic (degree and non-degree) programs. Amanda’s work will ensure that proposals for new programs, reviews of existing programs, and changes to existing programs meet the requirements of Waterloo’s Institutional Quality Assurance Process (IQAP).”

“Working with support staff in the Graduate Studies Office and Associate Vice-President, Academic Office, Amanda will also act as a key contact for academic departments whose programs are undergoing review, and she will liaise with various academic support units, including Institutional Analysis and Planning, the Centre for Teaching Excellence, the Centre for Extended Learning, the Library, Alumni Relations, Cooperative Education and the Centre for Career Action.”

“Please join us in welcoming Amanda to her new role,” Coniglio and Frank conclude.

Turing Award winner to give public lecture

The latest in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science's Distinguished Lecture Series takes place this afternoon as Professor Mike Stonebraker, a Turing Award winner and faculty member at MIT, delivers remarks entitled "The Land Sharks are on the Squawk Box (How Riding a Bicycle across America and Building Postgres Have a Lot in Common)."

Stonebraker's talk intermixes a bicycle ride across America during the summer of 1988 with the design, construction and commercialization of Postgres during the late 80’s and early ‘90’s. Striking parallels are observed, leading to a discussion of what it takes to build a new DBMS. Also, indicated are the roles that perseverance and serendipity played in both endeavours.

Professor Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the Ingres relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, Postgres. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a professor of computer science for twenty five years. More recently at MIT he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, the H-Store transaction processing engine, the SciDB array DBMS, and the Data Tamer data curation system. Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm4 and Tamr, Inc.

Stonebraker was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992 for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual SIGMOD Innovation award in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award in 2005, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at MIT, where he is co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center focused on big data.

The lecture takes place at 2:00 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre.

The School of Computer Science's Distinguished Lecture Series annually showcases a handful of outstanding thinkers in the field of computer science, giving them a forum to present their views and ideas to students, faculty, and the interested public.