Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Get ready to enter Portal 2.0

A message from the Portal Team.

The Portal team from the Student Success Office and Information Systems and Technology is excited to share that a new and improved Portal is here!

With enhanced features, improved speed, and a sleek new look, this new iteration makes Portal the ultimate digital assistant for Waterloo students. It offers personalized academic information, campus details, and ways for students to get involved.

Though most of us will continue to call it “Portal”, the official name changes from “Student Portal” to “UWaterloo Portal”. We’ve created a brand new Portal web platform, replacing the previous version at portal.uwaterloo.ca and we’ve reconstructed the app to match. Students whose apps aren’t set up to automatically update on their devices will need to update their Portal app manually. The Portal app can be downloaded through the iOS Appstore and the Android Playstore.

The big, official Portal launch with added features, much fanfare, and sweet Portal swag will take place in September with the start of fall term. In the meantime, the new Portal is available right now.

Check out our new UWaterloo Portal website for more information on UWaterloo Portal.

It's time to wake up and do some physics

By Sam Toman. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on Waterloo Stories.

When University of Waterloo physicist Anna Golubeva got an email saying she’d won the NSERC Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research she thought it was an elaborate phishing scam.

“I just got this email saying I had won the award and a $10,000 prize. It looked real, but who knows right?” says Golubeva sitting in an ultra-modern breakout room in the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “I didn’t believe it until I googled the woman’s name on the email and it all checked out.”

Golubeva shouldn’t have been that surprised. A year prior she was one of six Waterloo students who’d won a prestigious $50,000 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for academic excellence, research potential, and leadership. While Gilles Brassard winners are selected from Vanier Scholars, the students have no idea if they’re even being considered until they win — hence Golubeva’s suspicion.

She should probably get used to it. The Waterloo PhD candidate is steadily establishing herself as one of the top young physicists working in the world and the problems she is helping solve are at the vanguard of both physics and machine learning.

Her work explores quantum many-body systems and precisely how interactions between microscopic particles lead to complex properties of the macroscopic system. To do this, Golubeva must also pioneer machine learning to handle the heavy computing necessary for untangling the web of information produced by these quantum many-body systems.

If you don’t totally understand what that means, it’s okay, the 29-year-old Golubeva is warm, personable, quick to laugh and clearly empathetic enough to intuit when a non-physicist can’t comprehend her work. Quickly she transitions to lay-person-speak.

“Imagine you have a picture of an apple and an orange,” she says. “You can teach AI to tell the difference between the two based on a bunch of examples.”

The conventional way to solve this task of distinguishing between apples and oranges would be to write a set of rules by hand. “We call it ‘hard-coding,’” she says.

“But even for a simple task like this there are too many exceptions to account for: differences in shape, color, other elements in the picture that one hasn’t accounted for, etc. The key difference between conventional programming and AI is precisely that AI does not require the human programmer to provide a set of rules — instead, it derives the rules itself, based on the examples that we present it. We call that ‘training data.’”

For a non-native English speaker, the Moldovan-born, Russian-speaking, German-raised 29-year-old scientist has a clear knack for making some of the most theoretical ideas sound approachable.

“Oranges are round, apples are differently shaped. Maybe an apple has a little leaf, or an orange has a rough skin… are you still with me?” Golubeva jokes.

Apples and orange are different. Got it.

An AI program begins learning how to differentiate between the two. With every pair of images it builds more and more training data it can use to determine more complicated or subtle differences. Gradually it gets better and better with each correct guess. But, as Golubeva says, “it does not disclose the rules it has learned — that’s the problem.”

The solution Golubeva is working towards is applying those machine learning methods to solve problems in complex quantum many-body systems. At the moment, her focus is on the development of a solid theoretical understanding of this machine learning, which would expand its applicability in physics. This in turn will also improve the power of the very machine learning techniques she is employing.

“It’s like a closed loop of learning,” Golubeva says.

Read the rest of the article on Waterloo Stories.

Campus Wellness celebrates retiring staff

By Jeanette Gascho.

After 35 years of untiring service to the University of Waterloo, Chris Strome has announced her retirement. Chris has been instrumental in the growth of Health Services, and more recently, Campus Wellness. As Chris will tell you, she began in Health Services in the file room, pulling files for the physicians’ schedules every day. She retires as Operations Manager, Campus Wellness. First and foremost, we will miss her role as Go-To Person For Everything.

Chris has shown determination, resilience and leadership through many changes, both physical and structural. For many years, she worked very closely with the former Medical Director, Dr. Barbara Schumacher, in shaping Health Services, including the building we now enjoy.

We are deeply grateful that Chris chose to spend her career at UW, and thank her for her service here.

After 20 years of service to University of Waterloo, Barb Barlow has also announced her retirement. Barb first came to UW in 1999, and has supported the Financial area through many changes. For many years she was the primary administrative and financial support for Health Services’ physicians. Among many other critical tasks, Barb transcribed recorded psychiatry notes with a Dictaphone. It was not unusual, even relatively recently, to see Barb with the Dictaphone headset on, typing faster than anyone I know. In addition, every month since 1999, Barb made sure that the physicians – who are primarily independent contractors -- were paid appropriately: no small feat. When Barb started here, there were about six physicians. She retires as Financial Coordinator, Campus Wellness.

Barb has seen many changes, most related to the huge growth in volume of individuals seen, and physicians paid, and the ever-expanding financial work this entails. When she started here, there were about six physicians; there are now at least 26!

Barb looks forward to spending more time with those she cherishes most: her family and friends. We thank Barb for her steady presence and years of meticulous service to UW.

Chris and Barb have worked very closely over the years, and have developed an important working relationship as well as a personal friendship, supporting each other through many upheavals, uncertainties and growth. In the true spirit of friendship, they have chosen the same day as their last working day: May 22, 2019. Please take a moment to let them know how much they are valued, both personally and professionally. They will be missed.

Senate meets today and other notes

On the heels of the Victoria Day long weekend, the University's Senate has a rare Tuesday meeting today. Among the agenda items:

• A motion to approve a number of changes to the Graduate Studies Academic Calendar;
• Motions to increase the breadth requirements for the Bachelor of Arts as well as changes to the residency requirements in the undergraduate student calendar;
• A motion to inactivate the Honours Science and Business, Earth Sciences Specialization;
• A motion to appoint Johanna Wandel as the COU Academic Colleague for a three-year term;
• A motion to make a number of changes to Senate bylaws 1, 2, and 4 in light of restructuring and title changes in the Office of Research, and the office of the Associate Vice-President, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs will have its first reading;
• A motion to approve the dissolution of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR) and fold its activities into the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI);
• A motion to approve a new Master of Pharmacy program in Advanced Pharmacy Practice;
• A number of motions relating to program changes in graduate degree programs in Arts, Engineering, and Science;
• A motion to approve changes in the Graduate Studies Academic Calendar pertaining to graduate student progress;
• A number of motions relating to program changes in undergraduate degree programs in Arts;
• A motion to harmonize and centralize the regulations in the Undergraduate Calendar regarding the number of terms a student may be absent before that student will be required to submit an Application for Readmission; and
• A motion to delegate the approval of the roster of Graduands for the June 2019 Convocation ceremonies to the Senate’s Executive Committee.

TQT (Transformative Quantum Technologies) will be hosting a series of free Lunch & Learns during May and June. These events feature key topics in quantum technology presented by a variety of speakers. A light lunch will be provided, and all are invited to attend. The schedule is as follows:

• A Case Study in Patent Development: Quantum Random Number Generator, Thursday, May 23, 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., RAC 1 3003 (Quantum Explorations);
• Funding the Quantum Enterprise: Canadian Non-equity Sources, Thursday, May 30, 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., RAC 1 3003 (Quantum Explorations);
• From PhD to Start-up Employee: Real-world Perspectives, Thursday, June 27, 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., RAC 1 3003 (Quantum Explorations).