Thursday, April 28, 2022

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• Excellent teachers and researchers celebrated today
• The next big computing evolution
• Chief Information Officer to delay retirement until 2023
• University Health Network hires dozens of co-op students for launch of new health information system

Excellent teachers and researchers celebrated today

Congratulations are in order to those members of the University who are honoured as part of the President’s Excellence in Teaching and Research celebration. University of Waterloo professors, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who earned awards for either excellence in teaching or distinction in research are being honoured. 

The University of Waterloo is celebrating 189 University community members who have won teaching and research-related awards. 134 researchers at the University won research awards in the previous year, with 40 instructors receiving teaching awards and 15 people recognized for service and other achievements.

You can read the full roster of award winners on the President's Excellence in Teaching and Research website.

The next big computing evolution

By Rose Simone. This article was originally published on the Global Impact Report website.

Computing evolutions of the past few decades have already taken us from floppy discs to an era of almost instantaneous communication in an internet-connected world.

But quantum computers promise “an even bigger transformation,” says Christine Muschik, a physics and astronomy professor and member of the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

“You could simulate, for instance, new materials,” Muschik says. “You could develop better fertilizers. You could come up with new ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You could design new drugs.” 

These are examples of what she calls “interesting problems” that quantum computers could be used for. 

The quantum superpower found in nature 

Even the present-day supercomputers have their limits. They process information in the form of zeros or ones, one line at a time. This means that no matter how big or how powerful they are, some simulations are so complex they can’t be done with classical computers. 
 
But nature has an amazing computing superpower. It is called superposition, whereby information can be grasped in more than one state at the same time. (For example, the spin of a particle can be up and down at the same time.) “The classical computer runs out of steam and out of memory in keeping track of all the combinations, but nature does it effortlessly,” Muschik says. 
 
Being able to build computers to harness this quantum superpower is a long-standing dream of physicists. Even 40 years ago, long before quantum computers were a possibility, the famous physicist Richard Feynman said “nature isn't classical … if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical.”   

That’s what Muschik is working on. She wants quantum computers that can solve interesting problems, such as simulating quantum interactions, biochemical interactions, processes inside a neutron star or the early moments of the universe. 

New methods of scientific computing 

The technology is getting there. In 2019, Google scientists announced they had achieved “quantum supremacy” by solving a problem on a quantum computer that a classical computer could not solve. But it was a very narrow, specific problem. Getting a quantum computer to do something more complex is difficult. 

Muschik explains that in regular computers, there is a lot of error correction going on, as the bits of ones and zeros are being processed using the gates on a computer chip. In a quantum computer, correcting errors is possible in principle, but still technically challenging. The experimental quantum computers that exist today are not error-corrected and mistakes get through. “If I have too many quantum gates in my quantum circuit, then so much error accumulates that we see only noise in the computation,” she says.   

To solve this problem, Muschik is thinking outside the box. She is reimagining what computing itself could look like. “We are coming up with new methods for scientific computing,” she says. 

Muschik is internationally recognized for her creative research. She received a 2019 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics, given to early-career scientists of outstanding promise. She is still one of few women in the field, although she says women are getting much more support now. 

Combining classical and quantum computing 

Muschik’s group has achieved some remarkable successes. Most recently, they performed the first-ever simulation of baryons — the particles that make up the matter that surrounds us — on a quantum computer. 

To achieve this, the group used hybrid computing whereby a classical and a quantum computer are tied together in a kind of feedback loop. The classical computer can be tasked with parts of a problem that it can do easily, and then the quantum computer can take over to do the parts that are too complicated. They pass the problem back and forth to solve it in a resource-efficient way. 

“Instead of replacing the existing infrastructure, we can integrate the quantum computer into the existing infrastructure and complement it,” Muschik says.   

Continuing quantum computing research 

Muschik’s group has also been working on a completely new method to get around the extremely error-prone quantum gates in hybrid computing. When particles are entangled, the state (such as the spin value) of one particle in the pair can change instantly when a measurement is made on the other particle. Her group has shown that it is possible to do hybrid computing as a series of measurements on these quantum states and then use measurements to do the calculation, without the need for quantum gates. 

“The algorithms to do this look really strange because it's a completely different computing concept, but we have shown that it works,” Muschik says. Next, she hopes to team up with an experimental group to further develop this new measurement approach. 

“What is very interesting about this field is that there are is so much unexplored territory. There is a lot of room for true innovation and space for new ideas,” she says. 

Chief Information Officer to delay retirement until 2023

Chief Information Officer Bruce Campbell will be staying at the University of Waterloo a little while longer.

"As you know CIO Bruce Campbell's retirement plans for this August were announced last fall," wrote Vice-President, Academic & Provost Jim Rush in a memo circulated to Information Systems & Technology (IST) staff members earlier this week. "As announced in the Daily Bulletin on April 11, the University is making a senior leadership organizational change, such that the units of Information Systems and Technology, and Human Resources, will report to the new Vice President Finance and Administration (VPFA), once hired."

"The recruitment of Bruce’s successor will be the responsibility of the new VPFA," the provost writes. "Bruce has agreed to stay on as CIO until early 2023, to allow time for the recruitment of the new CIO.  This is preferable to the alternative of a fairly long interim CIO appointment, and it will also provide an overlap period where Bruce works with the new VPFA."

"Bruce will be taking some vacation time this summer and will appoint acting CIOs from among the IST Directors in the usual manner," the provost writes. "Thank you to Bruce for flexibility in his retirement plans."

The recruitment of the new VPFA is expected to conclude this fall.

University Health Network hires dozens of co-op students for launch of new health information system

By Ryan Kehoe. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on the Co-operative and Experiential Education website.

You have six months to complete and implement a brand-new health information system at the largest research hospital in Canada. What do you do? Hire a talented group of co-op students to help.

University of Waterloo co-op students are fast learners and can multi-task and shift priorities quickly. These skills were just what the University Health Network (UHN) needed to help implement their new health information system from Epic, with a project called Synapse. The hospital hired 114 UWaterloo co-op students for this transformational project.

Chelsea King (BSC’17) is the change management lead for the project at UHN. "It's more than just a job,” she says. “It's really an opportunity to contribute and give back in a way that will impact society."

King believes the healthcare sector is a thriving industry where co-op students can provide value for their employers.

"Working in healthcare is really a privilege,” says King. “Students have that opportunity to see it firsthand, to participate, and to help drive forward change. Change that will benefit patients for generations to come. It really is an amazing experience."

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Co-op experience carries over to new digital projects

During her own co-op experience, King worked on a very similar project called Dovetale at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton. After graduating, she was hired on to the project full-time and brought on 60 co-op students to assist.

Of the 60 co-op students King hired for the project, more than half of them came from Waterloo, her alma mater.

Her experience hiring at St. Joseph’s is proving to be beneficial at UHN.

Some of the students who were hired for the St. Joseph's project are returning to assist at UHN’s Synapse project. "We've hired at least a handful of them back onto UHN. Now, in more elevated senior positions as part of the training team—which is great to see," says King.

"We had some really great frameworks in place at St. Joseph's to check in with the students and support them. To make them feel like they weren't just a number but really a contributing member of the team," says King. "That's something that we’re certainly taking forward here to make sure we have success with the large number of students that we're bringing in."

A vital part of the team

King has hired students from many different programs to assist her team with this project, including Health Informatics, Life Sciences, Biology and Science and Business students.

The students UHN hires to assist with this project will take on one of two potential roles: at-the-elbow support or non-medical device testers.

As an ‘elbow’ support, co-op students will assist clinicians directly in dealing with any issues that arise during daily clinical work once the system goes live.

As a non-medical device tester, co-op students will be responsible for ensuring the devices will function as expected with the new system and helping with getting them ready for launch.

King has been a part of five Epic implementation projects and in each project, students were brought into assist. For each project, the co-op students played a very important role.

Read the rest of the article on the Hire Waterloo website.