Friday February 5, 2021

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• The inside scoop on Four All Ice Cream
• University Professor Ming Li receives lifetime achievement award
• Finding the mental health balance at long-term care facilities
• Friday's notes

The inside scoop on Four All Ice Cream

By Ryan Antooa. This article was originally published in Waterloo Magazine.

Ajoa Mintah (BASc ’01) has always had a force driving her forward in her life and career. “Part of what I tell myself is that I can do anything and everything, even when I’m at a disadvantage.”

From an early age, Mintah’s mother told her that,  as a Black woman, she would have to work three times harder than her peers. She also gave Mintah advice that would serve her throughout her career: “Never say no to yourself.”

After working as a chemical engineer for more than a decade, Mintah approached a crossroads. "I got to a point with my work where I hit a ceiling. I knew I wouldn’t be able to break through as a Black woman. So, I had a choice to make. Am I going to work for someone else and keep trying to break through or build my own house?

“The biggest question I had for myself was, ‘What’s stopping me from doing this?’ I realized I didn’t have to play by someone’s arbitrary rules in my career.” 

Mintah’s love for homemade ice cream began during a heat wave when she bought an ice-cream maker instead of an air conditioner. She founded Four All Ice Cream in 2016 and is committed to sourcing local,  sustainable and healthy ingredients. Four All’s ice cream factory is in the old Bonnie Stuart shoe factory on Whitney Place in Kitchener. There is also a Four All ice cream shop in Uptown Waterloo.

Process is everything

What may look like a dramatic career change, was actually change set in motion during her undergraduate degree. For Mintah the through-line for her career has always been process.

“I’m a chemical engineer – we design processes for how things are made. It can be applied to everything.”

“Even with Four All, people wanted to know about flavours and I was more concerned with the how of each and every process behind taking raw ingredients and creating something great.”

Problem-solving and creating processes are skillsets Mintah says she learned in Waterloo’s chemical engineering program and during co-operative education jobs. "Every co-op experience let me design, describe, document and develop processes, which was crucial for success in my corporate career and for Four All," says Mintah. Even with Four All, people wanted to know about flavours and I was more concerned with the how of each and every process behind taking raw ingredients and creating something great."

Read the rest of the article in Waterloo Magazine.

University Professor Ming Li receives lifetime achievement award

This article was originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

University Professor Ming Li has received the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science from CS-Can|Info-Can, the non-profit professional society dedicated to representing all aspects of computer science and the interests of the discipline across the nation. Conferred annually since 2014, the prestigious lifetime achievement award recognizes faculty members in departments, schools and faculties of computer science who have made outstanding and sustained achievement in research, teaching and service.

“On behalf of CS-Can|Info-Can, it is my great pleasure to inform you that you have been awarded a 2020 CS-Can|Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science,” wrote Kelly Lyons, Chair of the 2020 CS-Can|Info-Can Awards Committee in her letter. “Congratulations on this tremendous recognition by your computer science peers in Canada.”

University Professor Ming Li, the Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics, is known for his fundamental contributions to Kolmogorov complexity, bioinformatics, machine learning theory, and analysis of algorithms.

“Congratulations to Ming,” said Raouf Boutaba, Professor and Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Ming is a pioneer in Kolmogorov complexity, which has laid the foundation for a modern information theory. He is also a pioneer in computational biology, having introduced both algorithmic ideas into the field as well as demonstrated how computer scientists can contribute to real-word problems from protein sequencing to develop novel treatments for cancer to analyzing DNA sequencing data for studies in evolutionary biology.”

University Professor Li is the eighth faculty member in the Cheriton School of Computer Science to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from CS-Can|Info-Can. Previous recipients are University Professor M. Tamer Özsu (2018 recipient), Distinguished Professor Emeritus Don Cowan (2017 recipient), Professor Emeritus Ric Holt (2017 recipient), Distinguished Professor Emeritus Janusz Brzozowski (2016 recipient), University Professor J. Ian Munro (2016 recipient), Distinguished Professor Emeritus Alan George (2015 recipient), and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa (2015 recipient).

About University Professor Ming Li

University Professor Li completed his PhD at Cornell University in 1985, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. In 1988 he joined what was then the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

University Professor Li received the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 1996. He was named a University Professor by the University of Waterloo in 2009 and won the Killam Prize in 2010 for his contributions in computer science. He is the Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

University Professor Li has contributed significantly to developing a modern information theory and in shaping the field of computational biology. We live in an information society, but what exactly is information? Does a theory govern information-carrying entities similar to what Newtonian mechanics governs in classical physics? The answer is yes, and it is called Kolmogorov complexity — a field that University Professor Li and his colleagues introduced to computer science and have extended to many other fields.

Kolmogorov complexity and its applications

Kolmogorov complexity provides a universal measure of information, information content, and randomness. University Professor Li and his colleagues have extended Kolmogorov complexity to two sequences that leads to a universal metric of information distance. They have also connected information to thermodynamics and computed the ultimate thermodynamics cost of creating or erasing a sequence. This has led to zero-shot learning — a problem widely studied in computer vision, natural language processing and machine perception in which, at test stage, a learner recognizes objects from classes not previously seen at a training stage.

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

Finding the mental health balance at long-term care facilities

This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

In a study of seven long-term care facilities in New Brunswick, clinical information systems that tracked changes in residents’ status through the lockdowns were found to be crucial in helping homes make decisions over resource deployment.

The homes in New Brunswick successfully used these systems to help keep residents engaged, said John Hirdes, the principal investigator of the study and a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo. “They brought in new staff and programs and showed that you can do a good job in terms of mental health during lockdown.”

The strategies used by the homes included window visits and video chats, which were supported by the New Brunswick government through the distribution of iPads. One home hired students to facilitate virtual calls and engage in virtual one-on-one visits with residents. Students were also hired to increase recreation activities within the homes during lockdowns. 

Now, as governments continue to weigh restrictions at long-term care facilities, Hirdes said policy makers can use the associated clinical information systems’ outputs to guide resource deployment, and health-service researchers can examine the data to identify better management strategies for when a pandemic strikes again.

“A balance needs to be struck between quality of life and the risk to physical health,” Hirdes said. “When you have large numbers of visitors from the general community, just one asymptomatic person can wreak havoc. These are hard decisions, and this is where clinical information systems are helpful.” 

The researchers studied data from seven francophone long-term care homes in the province using a standardized assessment called the interRAI long-term care facility (LTCF) assessment, used by more than 30 countries to inform clinical care and evaluate the effect of strategies geared at improving mental health outcomes. The team reviewed 4,209 assessments from 765 residents between January 2017 and June 2020 and modeled the changes in depression, delirium and behavioural problems over time. 

“However, the facilities were not experiencing deaths and COVID-19 cases like in Ontario and Quebec, which would complicate how mitigating strategies are deployed,” Hirdes said.

In the seven homes that were studied In New Brunswick, mental health conditions such as depression, delirium and disruptive behaviour stayed the same, and in some cases, those behaviours even decreased. 

“Even though in-person visits with family decreased from 73 per cent to 18 per cent during lockdown, the percentage of residents who experienced depression, delirium and behavioural problems did not increase,” Hirdes said.

In the case of residents with dementia, delirium rates experienced a decrease, possibly because there was less noise and movement in the facility. However, those without dementia had slightly higher rates. 

“This study shows that thoughtful use of mitigating strategies and clinical information systems like the interRAI LTCF can help stabilize or improve mental health in long-term care homes, even during a lockdown,” Hirdes said. 

The study, “Evaluating the Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown on Long-Term Care Residents’ Mental Health: A Data-Driven Approach in New Brunswick,” was published in JAMDA and authored by Caitlin McArthur, Margaret Saari, George Heckman, Nathalie Wellens, Julie Weir, Paul Hebert, Luke Turcotte, Jalila Jbilou and John Hirdes.

Friday's notes

The Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement's Map the System competition registration deadline is Sunday, February 7 at 11:59 p.m.

This competition asks students to select a social or environmental issue and to explore, probe, and research all the connecting elements and factors around it. Students can register now.

"Do you want to earn a $5 Tim Horton’s gift card for your opinion?" asks the Writing and Communication Centre (WCC). "The WCC is looking to speak to students who have and have never used our services. We would be grateful if you could spare 45 to 60 minutes of your time to participate in an online focus group and give us your feedback."

If you are interested, sign up online. Sessions will take place on MS Teams between February 22 and February 26, 2021. The deadline to sign up is February 19 at 11:59 p.m.