Wednesday, December 1, 2021

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• Friesen Lecture with Sir Mark Walport set for December 8
• Concept $5K winners named
• Ihab Ilyas named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• New funding provides students the ability to power change through international experiences
• A word about snow closures

Friesen Lecture with Sir Mark Walport set for December 8

A message from the Office of Research.

The University of Waterloo welcomes Sir Mark Walport, the 2020 Henry G. Friesen International Prizewinner in Health Research, to deliver the Friesen lecture, “When Science meets Society: The competition between knowledge and values,” on Wednesday, December 8 at 10:30 a.m. 

Sir Mark Walport, FRS, FMedSci, HonFRSE, past Government Chief Scientific Advisor, UK and Past Chief Executive, UKRI, is a physician-scientist, academic leader, visionary health research planner and a champion of fundamental science in health research, engineering, technology and innovation.

The Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, established in 2005 by the Friends of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FCIHR), recognizes exceptional innovation by a visionary health leader of international stature.

Registration is required to receive a link to this free online event, open to faculty, staff, students and general public.

Concept $5K winners named

A message from Concept.

As the days get shorter and colder, we all start to anticipate time off at the end of the year to unwind, relax, and spend time with family and friends. For us it also marks the last Concept $5k Finals before the new year, and we couldn’t be more impressed with the teams who pitched this term. 

Although we are still fighting the effects of the pandemic, our students continued to dedicate themselves to their ideas. For that we want to congratulate each student who pitched at the Concept $5k Semi-Finals and Finals. 

We would also like to give a huge thanks to our panel of judges for taking the time to support the students at the Concept $5k Finals. Ryan Chiu (Analysis, Round13 Growth), Shambhavi Sole (Sr. Analysis, Student Venture Fund), and Farnoud Kazemzadeh (Co-Founder & VP Eng, VitalBio). Not only did they provide their expert advice and feedback to all teams, but also made the difficult decision of picking the winners of the Fall 2021 $5k Pitch Competition.

The winners of the fall 2021 $5k pitch competition are:

• Learnlist;

• PERCare;

• Hydro House; and

• Microbuild Masonry.

Your vote counts

Although the $5K grants have been named, the competition isn’t over yet because we want your say. Head over to the finalist pitches on YouTube and give a like on the video pitch of your favourite time. The team with the most video likes will be announced the People’s Champ and will receive $500. Voting is open until Thursday, December 2 and will be announced the next day on December 3 on our socials.

For videos of the winning teams, visit the Concept blog.

Ihab Ilyas named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

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

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ihab Ilyas has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his contributions to data integration, data cleaning and rank-aware query processing.

IEEE Fellowships are a prestigious professional recognition and an important career achievement. A Fellow is the highest grade of IEEE membership and it is conferred to those with an outstanding record of accomplishments. Each year, the total number of IEEE members recognized as Fellows does not exceed one-tenth of one per cent of the Institute’s total voting membership.

Over his career, Professor Ihab Ilyas has received many awards and has had multiple honours conferred by peers, professional organizations and associations, most recently his being named a Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

In 2020, Professor Ilyas was also named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to data cleaning and data integration. Since 2018, he has held the Thomson Reuters–NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Data Cleaning. He was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014, the same year in which he received a Google Faculty Award. He also held a Cheriton Faculty Fellowship at the University of Waterloo from 2013 to 2016 and a Fellowship at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies from 2006 to 2010.

Professor Ilyas’s many accomplishments include successful entrepreneurial pursuits. He co-founded two companies based on his research — Inductiv, a Waterloo-based start-up, now part of Apple Inc., that uses AI for structured data cleaning, and Tamr, a start-up focusing on large-scale data integration and cleaning.

Professor Ilyas’s contributions also include serving as an elected member of the Board of Trustees of the Very Large Data Bases Endowment in 2016 and as the Vice Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Management (SIGMOD) in 2017.

“Congratulations to Ihab on being named an IEEE Fellow,” said Raouf Boutaba, Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Ihab is well known to computer scientists in both academia and industry because of his contributions to scalable automatic error detection, to data cleaning, and to imputation of dirty structured data. He has pioneered scalable automatic data cleaning through the systems he, his students and collaborators have developed that use state-of-the-art machine learning models.”

Professor Ilyas is the seventh faculty member at the Cheriton School of Computer Science to receive the prestigious recognition of IEEE Fellow, following Professors N. Asokan, Raouf Boutaba, J. Alan George, Ming Li, M. Tamer Özsu, and Srinivasan Keshav who is an adjunct at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and is now at Cambridge.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities.

Read the rest of the article to learn more about Professor Ilyas's research and career.

New funding provides students the ability to power change through international experiences

By Namish Modi. This article was originally featured on Waterloo News.

Students can now apply to ear-marked opportunities with scholarships attached, to help overcome the barriers they may face to participating in international work-integrated learning (iWIL) experiences.

The University of Waterloo’s new Powering Change program will offer 65+ transformational iWIL experiences in more than 20 non-traditional locations. From January 2022 to March 2025, the program will benefit students who are Indigenous, have accessibility needs, or face income barriers.

The program is funded by Global Skills Opportunity (GSO), the Government of Canada’s outbound mobility program.

“We are committed to preparing our students for a volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous world,” says Norah McRae, Associate Provost of Waterloo Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE) at the University of Waterloo. “Part of this commitment extends to providing opportunities for students that face barriers. They are powerful change agents both locally and globally. We want their voices to be heard.”

A goal of the Powering Change initiative is to help students become agents of change and advance the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. A study authored by McRae and Shabnam Ivković, director of international strategic initiatives in CEE, outlines the important role that students play in the advancement of these goals.

“To support the 2019-2024 International Education Strategy, the Government of Canada has committed $147.9 million dollars to outbound student mobility. Waterloo has received $500,000 to support both virtual and in-person international experiences for students,” says Lisa ter Woort, international account manager in cooperative education and the coordinator of Powering Change. “As international travel opens up in early 2022, Waterloo students in co-op and other campus units with international mobility programs, will be able to apply for specific opportunities that advance the sustainable development goals (SDG), and will be supported by a Powering Change scholarship of $10,000 each.”

“We will dive deeper into how effective intercultural competency development can drive the UN’s SDGs and global challenges forward as part of the Future Ready Talent Framework,” says Ivković.

These scholarships will cover typical costs associated with international travel such as airfare and accommodation. For the virtual experience, the $1,000 scholarship can cover costs like program participation fees, software expenses, and equipment.

Working together for change

Powering Change is a campus-wide alliance between Waterloo’s Co-operative Education team and other international work-integrated-learning (iWIL) providers.

• Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE) – Affordable Energy for Humanity (AE4H)
• EDGE - World Association for Co-op Education (WACE) Global Challenge Program
• Faculty of Environment - International Development Program (INDEV)
• St. Jerome’s University (SJU) - Service-Learning Programs
• St. Paul’s University (SPU) - Waterloo Indigenous Students Centre (WISC)/Programs and Student Refugee Program (SRP)
• International employers, partners and iWIL opportunity providers

Questions about the program can be sent to Lisa ter Woort at terwoort@uwaterloo.ca.

A word about snow closures

Well, it's the first of December, and the white stuff is everywhere you look these days, so it's as good a time as any to review the University's weather closing guidelines.

According to the guidelines, the University and the affiliated and federated institutions of Waterloo will close "because of severe weather when normal operation would pose a significant danger to students and employees, or would prevent large numbers of them from coming to campus or returning safely to their homes."

The decision to close or remain open in severe weather is usually made by the Vice-President, Academic & Provost in consultation with the Director of Police Services, the Associate Vice-President, Communications, and the Associate Director, Parking, Grounds and Transportation. The Provost and the team of advisors meet to consider the conditions whenever severe weather is in the forecast and the team also seeks a wealth of information in order to inform the difficult decision of whether it is safe to open campus.

The advisory team evaluates:

• multiple sources of weather information and radar, as well as actual outside conditions;
• the condition of campus, including pathways, roadways, and buildings - and how long it will take to make movement on campus safe; 
• the status of local and regional roads, with input from the local city governments;
• whether local and regional public transportation is running including GRT and GO; and
• the conditions at Waterloo's satellite campuses.

The guidelines define the condition of "closed" to mean that "classes are not held; meetings and other scheduled events are cancelled; scheduled examinations are cancelled, to be rescheduled; deadlines for assignments and other submissions are postponed until the same hour on the next business day on which UW is not "closed"; staff, other than those providing "essential services," are not expected to be at work, but are paid for a normal day."

For the most part it is safe to assume that the University's default status is "open" unless messaging indicates otherwise.

Vice-President, Academic & Provost James Rush provided an update to campus way back in February of this year clarifying how pandemic-related lockdowns might affect the long-standing University guidelines. "In general, the plans in our current weather closing guidelines remain in place," the provost wrote in a memo to campus. "Though the pandemic conditions mean that the effects of a campus closure may be different this year, our decision-making has not changed. We will continue to assess whether the weather conditions make it safe to come to campus, move around and leave again."

"Ordinarily, our decision to close a campus in the event of severe weather means that classes are not held, meetings are cancelled and so on. Recognizing that the pandemic means that the majority of our work and learning is now happening remotely, these activities will continue," the provost wrote. "To be clear: a campus closure for severe weather relates only to the physical location and does not mean that all University business is suspended for the day. Work that can be done remotely should continue."

Notice of the University's status will be posted on days where severe weather is forecast, normally at 6:00 a.m., to allow faculty, staff and students time to decide their course of action that day. As the guidelines indicate, "those who judge that it may be unsafe to come to campus should discuss alternate work and study arrangements with their instructor or supervisor."

In the event of severe weather that warrants a closure, all members of the University community should consult the University’s homepage and Twitter feed, consult Portal, check the WatSAFE app, tune in to a local radio station, check local media websites or call the University’s Infoline (1-866-470-0910) to learn whether or not the University has closed.

The University also maintains a weather page with Environment Canada weather notices for the region and safety tips that will be updated in the event of severe weather.