Friday, November 1, 2019

International Education Week runs November 18 to 22

A message from Waterloo International.

The University of Waterloo is excited to be joining over 100 countries around the world in celebration of International Education Week (IEW) from November 18 to 22, 2019. The weeklong event will include workshops, activities and events hosted by several departments across campus.

The week will feature a special keynote presentation “Multilingualism in an Increasingly Globalized World” by documentary filmmaker and journalist, Alexandre Trudeau.

Alexandre Trudeau, renowned filmmaker and storyteller, will recount how speaking more than one language has enriched his life, both personally and professionally, and why he believes all students should have diverse opportunities for language learning and study abroad. The keynote will be followed by a panel discussion led by Associate Vice-President, International Ian Rowlands with special guests from Deloitte, BMW, Dale & Lessmann LLP and more. Panelists will discuss how language and international experience has benefited their career.

The keynote and panel will take place on November 21 from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre.

Registration for this event is required and will open on Monday November 4 at 9:00 a.m. Please visit the IEW Keynote registration page to reserve your seat.  

Please note, we are looking forward to welcoming a number of high school students from the area to campus for this keynote presentation. They will be here participating in a Global Career Booster Day which will include language and career programming in the morning. Due to this, tickets for the keynote will be limited. We encourage the campus community to register soon if you wish to attend. A limited waitlist will be available should more seats become available.   

For more information about IEW and to see a full list of all the events happening around campus, please visit the International Education Week webpage.

Remembering Distinguished Professor Emeritus Janusz Brzozowski

This article was originally published on the Computer Science website.

Janusz (John) A. Brzozowski, a pioneer of Canadian computing and a Professor of Computer Science at the University Waterloo for more than five decades, passed away peacefully on Thursday, October 24, 2019 at Lisaard House after a long battle with cancer. He was 84.

John was born on May 10, 1935 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1939, his father, Wienczyslaw, a captain in the Polish army, was captured and killed in Russia during World War II. In April 1940, John, his mother Maria, and sister Halina were deported to Kazakhstan. In 1942, they escaped with the army of General Anders to Persia. They were refugees in Tehran, and later, in Lebanon, until 1949 when they immigrated to Canada. While in refugee camps, John was educated by other Polish refugees. 

John graduated from St. Michael’s College School in Toronto in 1953. He received a bachelor’s (1957) and master’s degree (1959) in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. He completed a PhD at Princeton University in 1962.

Before his faculty position at the University of Waterloo in 1967, he taught at the University of Ottawa and the University of California, Berkeley. Over the course of his career, John supervised 15 PhD students and 28 master’s thesis and project students. 

Even after his retirement in 1996, John continued supervising students and publishing papers, including recent contributions that had received best paper awards — the CIAA 2018 Sheng Yu Award for Best Paper for “State Complexity of Overlap Assembly” and the CIAA 2017 Sheng Yu Award for Best Paper for “Complexity of Prefix-Convex Regular Languages.”

John was one of the earliest researchers in theoretical computer science in Canada. He made fundamental contributions to many areas of computer science, including digital circuits, algebra, and the theory of automata. He published almost 200 papers in the scholarly literature, and co-authored two books — Digital Networks with Michael Yoeli in 1978 and Asynchronous Circuits with Carl Seger in 1995.

John was a significant figure who helped to establish computer science at the University of Waterloo. He was chair of the Department of Computer Science for seven years — from 1978 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 1989 — and during that time he contributed substantially to its current size and international stature. He was also a leader in the development of computer science in Canada and around the world, through the Canadian Computer Science Chairs Committee and the Computing Research Association.

In June 2015, a conference was held at the University of Waterloo in honour of John’s 80^th birthday. The event, known as Brzozowski 80, was attended by dozens of his colleagues and former students, who delighted in singing happy birthday to him in Polish. A volume was published in 2017, with contributions from that conference entitled The Role of Theory in Computer Science: Essays Dedicated to Janusz Brzozowski, by World Scientific.

Read the rest of the article on the Computer Science website.

Sorting out the issue of office waste on campus

A message from Plant Operations.

By 2025, the University of Waterloo is aiming to divert at least 60 percent% of campus waste from landfill. Our longer term goal is to be a zero waste campus, diverting 90 percent of our waste from landfill.

You can make a difference!
 
Did you know that in 2018 more than 80 percent of office waste could have been diverted from landfill and recycled or composted? The fact is most office waste consists of coffee cups (organics), coffee cup lids (recycling), tissue (organics), pop cans and water bottles (recycling), paper/post it notes (recycling), food scraps/gum (organics), and snack bar wraps (garbage).

Please be environmentally responsible and take a brief moment to sort the waste you create. You may already know that across campus organic waste can now be disposed of into any washroom waste container – not only is this better for the environment but it also reduces odours. Alternatively, you can dispose of your office organic waste in a kitchenette countertop organics container.  

If you’d like a recycle bin for your office or a countertop organics container for your kitchenette/lunch room, please contact ToolCrib in Plant Ops (ext. 33657). For more information on how you can better sort your waste – consult the waste management information on the Sustainability or Custodial webpages or connect with Environmental Services in Plant Operations (ext. 84000) - we’d be glad to give a short presentation to your team to get them started on the path to Shift Zero.

Fall Open House and other notes

On Saturday, November 2, thousands of prospective students and their families are expected to visit the University of Waterloo for Fall Open House. The schedule of events includes campus tours from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., a student services fair, and tours of residences and athletics facilities. A number of academic sessions and tours will be held within each faculty. Future students and their families will have an opportunity to meet with professors, staff, and current students who can help them learn about what makes Waterloo unique. Free parking is available, and a shuttle bus tour will be running all day to show guests highlights of campus, and assist in reaching their varied destinations around campus. 

The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences is hosting the 2019 Farvolden Lecture that will feature Professor Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa's Earth and Environmental Sciences department entitled “Environmental isotopes in aquitard research: Are we finding solutions for nuclear waste isolation?” The lecture takes place at 2:00 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre. Can’t attend in person? View the livestream.

On Tuesday, November 5, Professor James Diamond, chair of Jewish studies at Waterloo, will give a talk entitled "The Buried Raging Sermons of the Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi," which involves a recovered manuscript of weekly sermons delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto by a Hasidic rabbi desperately trying to preserve his faith in the face of unimaginable loss and pain. The talk is presented in co-operation with the Department of Religious Studies and the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies. The event takes place on Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. in the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Finally, Halloween may have passed us by for another year, but luckily there is photographic evidence of the folks who dressed up and decorated their workspaces across campus:

Staff in University Relations dressed up as their stylish colleague Chris Wilson-Smith (seated).

Student Success Office communications staff celebrated 'SSOChella,' a festival whose lineup included Nickelback, ZZ Top, Def 'Leopard', Destiny’s Child, and One Direction.

Communications staff in the Student Success Office dressed up as the cast of Charlie's Angels, including Charlie phoning it in via intercom!

Wokka-wokka-wokka: Library staff members dressed up as Pac Man characters.

Plant Operations held its annual costume contest. The winner this year was Jennifer Letson as the Mad Hatter, with Denise Lachaine getting second prize as Hulk Hogan (this aging Hulkamaniac salutes you, Denise). Special thanks to Dee Bairos, staff member in Key Control, who organized the contest.