Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Campus comes together for Thrive Day

Today is Spring 2019 Thrive Day at Waterloo. Wear your Thrive T-shirt and attend one of the many events taking place on campus today to show your support for building positive mental health. Events include:

• Mental Health Booths and Activities - 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the SLC Great Hall.
  • Feds Wellness Day Team: Smiley-Face Balloons and Resources
  • Peer Health Education: Lemonade and Wellness Packages
• Positivity Buttons - All day at Dana Porter, Davis Centre and Musagetes Architecture Library
• Free Peer Health Education Thrive Package with Tips on How to Thrive at UW - Time varies, pick up at your faculty society during their office hours
• More Feet on the Ground Mental Health Training for Students - 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Register on LEADS.
• Personal Wellness and Motivation Activities with Residence Life Staff - 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in Claudette Millar Hall, Main Lobby”
• Graduate student lawn games and popsicles — Wednesday, June 19, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Graduate House Green. Join your graduate student peers for a Spring Thrive event! Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs along with the Graduate Student Association will be set-up on the Grad House green with lawn games and popsicles. Take a break and drop by for a sweet treat and some fun.

Women leaders share their journey to leadership

Waterloo women-identified Deans and senior administrators will share details about their path to leadership, the ways they overcame barriers and what they wished they had known along the way at a special event today in Federation Hall. The Journey to Leadership event has been organized by the Equity Office and the Research, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Council.

The panelists include:

• Professor Diana Parry;
• Professor Susan Tighe;
• Professor Pearl Sullivan; and
• Professor Jean Andrey.

Professor Anita Layton will moderate the panel. 

The event will feature a breakout opportunity for attendees to speak to the panelists individually, engage in dialogue and ask questions about more specific topics.

The event takes place at Federation Hall. Light refreshments will be provided.

IST explores Microsoft Office 365 email for employees

Information Systems and Technology (IST) is considering moving University employee email into the cloud.

“Email services for University employees are currently hosted on an on-premises Microsoft Exchange environment, while email services for undergraduate students are hosted on the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 environment,” wrote Chief Information Officer (CIO) Bruce Campbell in a memo circulated to Executive Council on June 6. “I believe it is time to evaluate whether employee email should be moved to Office 365, and eliminate our on premises Exchange environment.”

In such a model, employees would continue to use familiar email and calendaring tools including Outlook, web mail, and smart phone apps, however, the email servers themselves would be located in a Canadian Microsoft data centre.

According to Campbell, the benefits of such a change include reduced cost to the University and an enhanced user experience that includes improved service, larger email quotas, and a new opportunity for employees to collaborate with students. 

“A recent survey suggests most Canadian universities have already moved their employee email to the cloud, with Office 365 being the most common platform used,” Campbell wrote. “We have held consultations with four Ontario universities (Toronto, Queen’s, Ottawa and Western) who have recently moved to Office 365 for employees, to learn of their experiences and any challenges encountered.”

“Many in our research community have already individually embraced cloud solutions (e.g. Dropbox), and several of the University’s enterprise solutions (e.g. Workday, Unit4, LEARN) are cloud hosted. We have completed a Privacy and Security Impact Assessment (PSIA) with IST’s Information Security Services team and the Secretariat, and concluded that cloud hosting of employee email would meet applicable privacy legislation and University policy.”

“In the coming months, we will begin broader campus consultations on this potential change, including in-person and online opportunities for feedback and questions,” Campbell’s memo concludes.

In the meantime, questions may be directed to IST’s Director of Client Services Andrew McAlorum.

Tech is strong and free at True North 2019

The University of Waterloo will be a sponsor and partner for True North 2019, the annual conference led by Communitech. The conference takes place today and tomorrow at the Lot42 space in Kitchener.

The event will include a lineup of 50 thinkers and builders who will discuss topics like AI, data security, quantum computing and digital detox, and among them will be University of Waterloo researchers, alumni, and partners, including:

• Marcel O’Gorman of English Language and Literature; 
• Roger Melko of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Faculty of Science;
• Michele Mosca of the Institute for Quantum Computing;
• Waterloo alumnus Jade Choy, CEO and Co-founder of EPOCH;
• Waterloo alumnus Ryan Garipey of Clearpath Robotics;

The True North Festival is open to the public as well as conference attendees and includes concerts on both June 19 at Waterloo Town Square and June 20 in downtown Kitchener. There are more than 50 events to discover across the region.

True North will also feature the launch of the inaugural Leaders Prize, a national competition that will award $1 million to the winning team solving a problem of global significance using artificial intelligence.

Engineering prof publishes poetry; other notes

This article was originally published on the Faculty of Engineering's news site.

A mechanical and mechatronics professor has recently published her first collection of poems in English and Persian titled Tales of Existence, A Collection of Poems.

Shahrzad Esmaeili, pictured on the right, credits the University of Waterloo, where she began teaching in 2004, for providing inspiration for some of her poems.

"As I ponder my new life journey in poetry, I see the trails of the natural beauty of the University campus, which helped me in the process of starting to write in Spring 2014," she says. "The spring blossoms on the campus grounds, its beautiful creek with swimming ducks, dandelion-covered grass, colourful birds and their songs, were inspirations for my earliest poems."

Esmaeili's book of poetry is available for purchase in the UW Authors section of the University of Waterloo bookstore or online.

Partial proceeds from sales will go towards student activities at the University.  

The International Spouses group's Spring Term Potluck is scheduled to take place on Saturday, June 22 from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. If you are the partner or spouse of an international student, post-doc, visiting professor or Waterloo faculty or staff member, you, your partner/spouse, and family are invited to attend. Full details about the potluck are available on the International Spouses website.

Waterloo’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience invites everyone to an open house, the culmination of a two-week workshop that teaches researchers how to build sophisticated brain models. These international experts will demonstrate brain models running on laptops, robots, and specialized brain-like computers while simulating neural functions. Among the brain-like computers used at the summer school is Loihi, a new neuromorphic chip developed Intel Labs.

The workshop is focused on using the Nengo brain simulator, developed by Professor Chris Eliasmith’s lab in the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, to build state-of-the-art AI applications that run on neuromorphic hardware.

The open house will be held on Friday, June 21 from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in E7-7303.