Thursday, September 28, 2017

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• HeForShe scholarships awarded to exceptional first year STEM students
• Computer Science launches new data science lab
• Beautiful U: painting series celebrates Waterloo's 60th
• Science alumni awards and other notes

HeForShe scholarships awarded to exceptional first year STEM students

This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the Waterloo Stories website.

Six HeForShe IMPACT scholarships have been awarded to exceptional female students entering their first year as undergraduates in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). The scholarships are part of the University of Waterloo’s commitment to encourage more young women to pursue fields in STEM, where females are currently underrepresented.

Waterloo is the only Canadian university taking part in the UN Women’s HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative to achieve gender parity. As part of this initiative, the University aims increase female representation in STEM education and careers, enhance female faculty representation, and promote female leaders into senior university positions.

The 2017 recipients each have their own unique experiences that sparked their interest in STEM but they are equally as excited to take the next step towards pursuing their passions.

For a full list of scholarship recipients, please visit the Waterloo Stories site.

Computer Science launches new data science lab

The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science will unveil a new lab today. Located on the third floor of the Davis Centre, the recently completed 5,000 square foot data systems lab is an open-concept space for more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and other researchers to conduct innovative, high-impact research in big data and data science.

“Data — be it web data, social data, financial data, transaction data or sensor data — comprise the ‘secret sauce’ that powers innovations today, from search engines to self-driving cars to intelligent agents,” said Professor Jimmy Lin, the David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems.

Data scientists depend on systems that can effectively capture, clean and process data to extract meaningful insights. Beyond the sheer scale at which these systems need to operate, a common shortcoming is the inability to synthesize heterogeneous data, thus organizations often miss critical insights that can be discovered only by merging disparate silos. This isolation is also reflected in how research areas are organized at many universities.

“To tackle this problem, we literally needed to get everyone into the same room, so I proposed creating a new data systems research group with a common lab,” Lin said. By bringing together existing strengths in information retrieval and data management, the new data systems group bridges the gap between structured and unstructured data, tackling all aspects of the data lifecycle, from ingestion and cleaning to machine learning and decision support.

“The data systems group’s research brings together some of the world’s best researchers in databases and information retrieval, and the new lab will be an international centre for really groundbreaking work,” said Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science Mark Giesbrecht. “This intense research focus is complemented by our new data science graduate and undergraduate degrees, where we aim to educate and train the next generation of technical leaders in data science,” he added.

The data systems lab was constructed with support from Waterloo’s Cheriton Endowment and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. The lab will be inaugurated on Thursday, September 28 as part of the 2017 Cheriton Symposium. David R. Cheriton, for whom the School was named, will be present for the opening celebration. The inauguration event takes place at 5:00 p.m. in DC 3301.

Beautiful U: painting series celebrates Waterloo's 60th

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Two paintings, one representing the University of Waterloo and the federated and affiliated institutions, and the other the Faculty of Science.

by Wendy Fletcher. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the University of Waterloo's 60th anniversary website.

The paintings in this series are a collection of 11 canvases done in oil and acrylic with glass, charcoal, gold leaf and calligraphy ink: one canvas which gathers all of the branding colours of the University, one for each of the 6 faculties and one each—to be hung as a collective—for the Affiliated and Federated Institutions of Waterloo.

The style used in the paintings in known as neo-modern expressionism. The theory behind this genre of work is that meaning through art can be communicated most deeply through the use of colour and of symbol. You will notice in the paintings that the work is largely not representational. In this genre of work, representation happens only in deference to the symbiology it hopes to evoke.

The symbols are particular to each painting reflecting core aspects of the work in each faculty and college. Each painting needs to be read much like a, “Where’s Waldo” montage! Embedded in each painting are a variety of symbols which the viewer should read through the lens of their own experience of the discipline areas, in conversation with the artist’s lens- the story which is embedded in the paintings.

The Faculty of Mathematics depicted on the left; and the Faculty of Environment on the right.

Each painting for me was a journey in coming to know this University and its particular but shared work in new ways. It is my experience that you cannot paint something with which you have no relationship. Moving more deeply into a reflective space, a deeper knowing with reference to the work of each of our parts has been very illuminating. The necessary contribution of each part to the project of a more liveable world has impressed itself upon me (did you know- math is in everything~?!).  Also, the common spirit which runs through us all became very evident to me as I worked. I would name that common spirit as vitality, dynamism: a very strong energy directed toward moving us forward- as society, as a world community- often by leaps and bounds.

Read the rest of the article on the 60th anniversary website.

Science alumni awards and other notes

The Faculty of Science will be hosting the Science 60^th Alumni of Honour Award Celebration on Friday, September 29 from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m. in EIT 1015 with a reception immediately following in the EIT museum foyer. Speakers include Dean of Science Bob Lemieux and interim Vice-President, Academic & Provost George Dixon.

At the event, the Faculty will continue with a tradition launched at the University's 50^th anniversary in 2007 that included an ongoing Distinguished Alumni Award and 50 one-time-only Alumni of Honour awards. The faculty has added 10 names for the University's 60^th anniversary, and in addition, the inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, Professor Stephen Scherer, is visiting the Waterloo campus to deliver a keynote address.

To further mark the occasion, a 60^th anniversary plaque with the 10 recipients' names has been installed in the Peter Russell Rock Garden beside the 50^th anniversary plaque. The installation took place over the weekend.

This Friday afternoon, the Industrial-Organizational Psychology program is hosting a colloquium talk by distinguished alumna Professor Arla Day. The title of Professor Day's remarks is "Psychologically Healthy Workplaces: EMPOWER’ing Workers & Organizations." The event takes place at 3:00 p.m. in PAS 1241.

Professor Day will speak about her EMPOWER partnership as a way to address health and functioning of workers at risk. She frames this research partnership in terms of her work she started over 20 years ago at Waterloo, and how it evolved from work-family conflict and stress research into the development of the area of Psychologically Healthy Workplaces. She will discuss the project's focus and will review some of their studies that address the holistic mandate of the partnership of supporting individual, strengthening groups, developing leaders, and creating healthy organizations.

Day is a Professor and former Canada Research Chair in I/O Psychology at Saint Mary's University.