Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Self-declaration of vaccination status required for campus access in September

Beginning September 1, employees and students will need to anonymously self-declare their vaccination status to come to campus as the University supports advocacy efforts calling for a provincial order for mandatory vaccination in the post-secondary sector.

"Throughout the pandemic, we have kept measures in place to try to limit the spread of the virus and to protect your health when you have needed to come to campus," wrote Vice-President, Academic & Provost James Rush in a memo circulated to campus yesterday. "As we get closer to September, we are continuing to look for ways we can promote safety and do our part to mitigate a fourth wave of COVID-19."

"Ensuring high rates of vaccination remains one of the most important ways we can protect public health. Last week, the Council of Ontario Universities wrote to the provincial government calling for mandatory vaccination and validation of vaccination status or negative test results for anyone studying or working at post-secondary institutions this fall. We support these calls."

"Ensuring there is a coordinated and consistent government approach to vaccine policy, that does not leave it to individual groups, businesses and institutions is essential to avoid public confusion and concern."

"We will continue to monitor developments on mandatory vaccination and keep you informed."

"Starting in September, you will be required to self-declare your vaccine status to come to campus," the provost's memo says. "We will require anyone who comes to campus to self-declare their vaccine status. We will use this anonymous data in aggregate to plan and adapt Health and Safety approaches for the Fall 2021 term."

"This step is important as we continue to find ways to create safe spaces for working and learning. Our plans will remain flexible as we assess the ever-changing risks presented by COVID-19 and as public health and government guidance also change over time."

"Starting September 1, Campus Check-In will ask you to declare whether you have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. If you answer “yes”, you must have been fully vaccinated for at least 14 days."

"If you respond “no” or “prefer not to say,” we will provide you with information about vaccination, booking appointments and other public health measures. We will also direct you to the rapid antigen screening program and you will be expected to participate in screening twice a week. You must continue to have a negative test result to come to campus. We will ensure that anyone who tests positive confirms the result with a PCR test at the Health Services COVID-19 Testing Assessment Centre and must self-isolate as directed by health practitioners."

"Our team of medical professionals in Health Services will also monitor Campus Check-in for individuals who fail the daily screening questionnaire. Anyone who fails the screening will receive private health consultation on safe actions to take."

"You can expect to see more information on this self-declaration program and other related topics on the COVID-19 information website in the coming weeks," the provost's memo concludes.

The Health Services COVID-19 Testing Assessment Centre is open to University of Waterloo students, employees, postdocs and their family members.

Change is difficult and can create stresses on individuals. If you are suffering or need to talk, you can contact the Employee and Family Assistance Program provided by Homewood Health at 1-800-663-1142.

Third hydro feed connection project takes one step closer to completion

A message from Plant Operations.

During the Civic Holiday long weekend, our campus was busy with electrical trades, consultants, and contractors supporting a major power shutdown of our main campus. The entire south portion of the main campus, encompassing over 30 buildings from PAS to EIT was de-energized.

Didn’t we just have a large power interruption in July? Yes, that was the North portion of our main campus. This weekend was the south portion - two large pieces of the same puzzle required for the connection of a third electrical feed to the main campus and to accommodate a major upgrade to our electrical infrastructure.

This service interruption was significant on many fronts: it impacted a huge part of our academic facilities and the electrical system, which had not been shut down since 1997. A great deal of planning and design work was done in the spring, generators were brought on-site to protect sensitive research equipment, and on August 2, we were “all hands on deck”. Thank you to all the dedicated Plant Operations staff and the independent contractors who gave up their long summer weekend and worked diligently from 5:30 a.m. until late afternoon. The work went smoothly, and services were restored as planned.

Additional service interruptions on smaller/building scales are scheduled for the rest of the month. These smaller puzzle pieces are all required to complete the third hydro-feed project.  

If you would like to receive a Service Interruption notification, you can self-subscribe via the Plant Ops website. The system allows each subscriber to specify/and change the type of service they would like to be notified of.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Researchers develop real-time lyric generation technology to inspire songwriting

Lead researcher Olga Vechtomova demonstrating how LyricJam generates lyric lines for live instrumental music.

Music artists can find inspiration and new creative directions for their song writing with technology developed by Waterloo researchers.

LyricJam, a real-time system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate lyric lines for live instrumental music, was created by members of the University’s Natural Language Processing Lab. 
 
The lab, led by Olga Vechtomova, a Waterloo Engineering professor cross-appointed in Computer Science, has been researching creative applications of AI for several years. 

The lab’s initial work led to the creation of a system that learns musical expressions of artists and generates lyrics in their style.

Recently, Vechtomova, along with Waterloo graduate students Gaurav Sahu and Dhruv Kumar, developed technology that relies on various aspects of music such as chord progressions, tempo and instrumentation to synthesize lyrics reflecting the mood and emotions expressed by live music. 

As a musician or a band plays instrumental music, the system continuously receives the raw audio clips, which the neural network processes to generate new lyric lines. The artists can then use the lines to compose their own song lyrics. 

“The purpose of the system is not to write a song for the artist,” Vechtomova explains. “Instead, we want to help artists realize their own creativity. The system generates poetic lines with new metaphors and expressions, potentially leading the artists in creative directions that they haven’t explored before.”

The neural network designed by the researchers learns what lyrical themes, words and stylistic devices are associated with different aspects of music captured in each audio clip. 

For example, the researchers observed that lyrics generated for ambient music are very different than those for upbeat music.

The research team conducted a user study, inviting musicians to play live instruments while using the system. 

“One unexpected finding was that participants felt encouraged by the generated lines to improvise,” Vechtomova said. “For example, the lines inspired artists to structure chords a bit differently and take their improvisation in a new direction than originally intended. Some musicians also used the lines to check if their improvisation had the desired emotional effect.”

Another finding from the study highlighted the co-creative aspect of the experience. Participants commented that they viewed the system as an uncritical jamming partner and felt encouraged to play their musical instruments even if they were not actively trying to write lyrics. 

Since LyricJam went live in June this year, over 1,500 users worldwide have tried it out.

The team’s research, to be presented at the International Conference on Computations Creativity this September, has been pre-published on arXiv. Musicians interested in trying out LyricJam can access it at https://lyricjam.ai.

Addressing the human costs of climate change

Western Provincial Health Office – Far left: Chris Thomas, second from right Craig Janes, far-right Andrew Silumesi, Director of Public Health for the Zambia Ministry of Health.

This article was originally posted on the Water Institute website.

Congratulations to Water Institute member Craig Janes, professor and director of the School of Public Health Sciences, along with WI colleague Jennifer Liu, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology, and their research team, who have been awarded funding through a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Project Grant.

Their project “Impact of flooding on the accessibility and utilization of health services in Western Province, Zambia” has been awarded more than $500,000 over three years.

The Water Institute is pleased that the development of this project flourished due to a Water Institute seed grant to Craig Janes and colleagues in 2016 entitled, “Implementing a Satellite-based GIS Imaging System to Inform Health System Planning in Western District, Zambia”. The seed grant, plus a grant from the UK-Natural Environment Research Council in 2017 to colleague Chris Thomas (co-investigator on the seed grant), laid the conceptual, technical, and methodological groundwork for this project.

Initial funding also, importantly, supported the development of local networks and the creation of the Zambezi Ecohealth Partnership – a knowledge platform dedicated to improving the lives and livelihoods of communities in the Zambezi River watershed.

This newly-funded project will enable researchers to assess the impact of increasing variable seasonal flooding on access and utilization of high priority health services (e.g., maternal health care, HIV prevention and care) and develop models that will scale to regional/national levels.

“For me, one of the most exciting and promising aspects of this project is our exceptional interdisciplinary and international team, hailing from Zambia, the UK, Hong Kong, and Canada, and representing diverse disciplines — medicine, epidemiology, health services research, anthropology, geography, and ecology. This will be a complex project, but one that I think will be highly innovative and transformative in its approach to addressing the human costs of climate change,” says Janes.

Highly innovative and transformative in its approach to addressing the human costs of climate change.

The team will also assess whether the Zambia-based models and methodology are relevant to other jurisdictions, including rural and remote communities in Canada. To their knowledge, the proposed study is the first to analyze health care access and utilization in a dynamically modelled, social-ecological system.

Congratulations to the project team: C. Janes, K. Grépin, Z. Butt, F. Goma, J. Liu, D. Singini, M. Smith, C. Thomas and C. Wallace.