Thursday, November 28, 2019

Project will improve name usage experiences on campus

Members of the University community will soon be able to use a chosen or preferred first name when accessing University online services.

In response to feedback from students, the “Improving Name Usage” project was initiated to allow students the opportunity to use a chosen/preferred first name broadly on campus, while retaining their legal first name on tax receipts and official documents. 

“This project, influencing 26 information systems throughout campus, has required collaboration among a number of key partners, and the participation of number of committees,” said a memo distributed by Catherine Newell Kelly, university registrar and Jeff Casello, associate vice-president, graduate studies and postdoctoral affairs. “Privacy and human rights legislation is informing the process, and student consultations helped drive decision-making.”

With the partnership of Information Systems and Technology, this project will take effect for all undergraduate and graduate students in winter 2020. Students who wish to provide a chosen/preferred first name will be directed to WatIAM. The chosen/preferred name entered will then be propagated to downstream campus systems so this name can be used broadly; for example, in class by instructors, by interviewers during the co-op hiring process, and on their WatCard. To further support students, WatCard replacement fees will be waived for the months of January 2020 and May 2020. Communication to students will start in the next few days. 

Employees who have entered a familiar name in WatIAM in the past will now see this name in systems that access WatIAM, such as the White Pages, DUO, Office 365, and their email account. If the employee has an account in Quest (e.g., as an instructor or student) their chosen/preferred name will now be displayed in Quest and any of the downstream systems the employee uses (e.g., LEARN). If the employee has no chosen/preferred/familiar name entered in WatIAM, the field will continue to display their legal first name. Employees are encouraged to log in to WatIAM prior to January 2020 to verify and update, if necessary, the information in the familiar name field. Note, the name change process currently in place in Workday will not change.

“As part of this project, to comply with the Ontario Human Rights Code, Quest access to student name information may change for campus stakeholders, specifically faculty and staff,” says the memo. “Quest inquiry access will now only display chosen/preferred first name. If your role requires access to both the legal and chosen/preferred student names, your department head/chair should email rt-quest@rt.uwaterloo.ca and specify rationale for the need.”

“Despite our best efforts to catch every instance of where the first name appears across campus, something may have been missed. After January, help us by reporting any issues to askthecentre@uwaterloo.ca so we can work to get it corrected,” the memo concludes. “A project with this level of complexity is only possible with extensive cooperation by the campus community. We offer our immense appreciation to everyone involved in helping to improve this important aspect of the student experience.”

Professor named 2019 ACM Distinguished Member

This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Professor Florian Kerschbaum a Distinguished Member. He joins 62 individuals globally who have received this prestigious recognition in 2019 for outstanding scientific contributions. ACM Distinguished Members are responsible for an extraordinary array of achievements, reflecting many areas of research and practice in the field of computing and information technology.

“On behalf of ACM and the Committee, I am delighted that you will be among the inductees honoured with this designation and congratulate you on this well-deserved recognition,” wrote Rao Mannepalli, Chair of the ACM Distinguished Member Committee, in his letter to Professor Kerschbaum. 

Professor Kerschbaum, who is also the Executive Director of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, has developed and helped deploy several application-specific methods for searching and computing on encrypted data. He has developed a comprehensive set of searchable encryption algorithms for database operations. These include property-preserving encryption algorithms that enable efficient search without modification of the database management system and can withstand snapshot attacks much better than other order-preserving algorithms. 

Professor Kerschbaum has also developed methods to compile secure multi-party computation protocols from ideal functionality specifications. He developed the first compiler optimization technique operating at the source language level, transforming an ideal functionality into a protocol that interleaves securely and locally computed steps. 

Professor Kerschbaum is also a pioneer in using multi-party computations for supply chain management. This includes protocols for master planning, lot size planning, and detailed scheduling. These planning methods have enormous economic potential because they overcome hurdles to data sharing in current supply chain management planning. Collaborative methods have enormous savings potential over local planning, but they are not implemented in practice because of concerns over what the necessary data might reveal. Multi-party computations enable implementing the planning methods over encrypted data. As the coordinator of the EU-funded project SECURESCM, Professor Kerschbaum led an efficiency improvement in linear programming over encrypted data by more than five orders of magnitude. These works also include the first multi-party computation of an artificial intelligence optimization algorithm.

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

Going multimodal at the StoryCamp competition

This article was originally published on the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business website.

More than 135 registrants from Waterloo's main campus, the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business and other institutions, descended upon the Stratford School Saturday morning to participate in StoryCamp, a 15-hour design competition on multimodal storytelling.

Participants were challenged to create a story with the theme of community and connectivity that followed an assigned story arc. Under the mentorship of industry experts, in a broad range of disciplines—including visual storytelling, social media, user experience, game design, branding and business—students crafted their stories in 3 different modes. The event culminated in the teams pitching their creations to a panel of judges.

"Experiences like this make our program unique, and the student experience here at the Stratford School invaluable," notes professor Laura Fong, one of the key organizers of the event.

Throughout the hackathon-style event, workshops on cultural storytelling and the importance of storytelling in business, design, and working in teams were delivered.

"I normally avoid group projects because of my fear [I'm] not able to contribute to my teams, but this time, I actually enjoyed [the] team project! My team was very supportive and helped each other in developing the product." wrote Akshar Goyal, Bachelor of Math student on his LinkedIn page.

"We had mentors and workshop leaders join us from many industries and disciplines, and even as far away as Malmo, Sweden to make this happen." said Fong.

One mentor, Jennie Heo, from IBM, posted on LinkedIn, "It was great to see students from different disciplines and skills collaborating together, brainstorming and aligning on their ideas. Learning how to blend diverse perspectives and create a unified story is an invaluable lesson for us all!"

The winning team, CommUNITY (comprised of Aleksandra Raznatovic, Noah Pratt, Francis Boehmer, Noor Mubarak, Jessica Silverberg, Colleen Yu and Layth Fanek), created a social movement to help people have a sense of belonging in their community. It was selected out of 15 teams and over 100 participants.

The interdisciplinary teams in StoryCamp and the universal importance of storytelling were foundational to the event's success. Check out the winning teams, project submissions, and mentors.