Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Waterloo ranks in top 100 global universities making an impact

By Stephanie Longeway. This article was originally published in Waterloo News.

The University of Waterloo has once again placed in the top 100 universities in the world on the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings 2022. This year, Waterloo moves up 46 spots on the list to number 53.

The Impact Rankings are an annual measure of a university’s social and economic impact based on the institution’s success on delivering the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Waterloo ranked in the top 100 in 12 out of 17 SDGs including:

• Top 50 in the world for No Poverty (SDG 1), Zero Hunger (SDG 2), Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11) and Life Below Water (SDG 14)
• Top 50-100 in the world for Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6), Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8), Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10), Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), Climate Action (SDG 13), Life on Land (SDG 15), Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (SDG 16), and Partnerships for the Goals (SDG 17)

“Our performance and improvement in this year’s ranking is a testament to our commitment to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” says Vivek Goel, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo. “Waterloo has been consistently participating in the UN’s 17 SDGs with an intent of using their comprehensive framework to monitor our own performance year over year. I am very proud of the work we are doing at the University to be global leader in adopting the UN’s blueprint for peace and prosperity now and for our collective future.”

Waterloo is the founding institution for Sustainable Development Solutions Network Canada whose mission is to mobilize Canadian scientific and technological expertise and accelerate problem solving for the UN’s SDGs.

This is the fourth year THE has published the Impact Rankings, and the number of participating institutions continues to grow to 1,406 universities from 106 regions around the world. To learn more, view the THE Impact Rankings 2022 announcement.

PhD graduate Ryan Goldade receives 2021 Alain Fournier Award

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

Ryan Goldade has received the 2021 Alain Fournier Dissertation Award for his thesis titled “Efficient Liquid Animation: New discretizations for spatially adaptive liquid viscosity and reduced-model two-phase bubbles and inviscid liquids.”

This national award, conferred by the Canadian Human Computer Communication Society, recognizes an outstanding doctoral dissertation in computer graphics completed at a Canadian university. The annual award is named in honour of Alain Fournier, a researcher who promoted excellence in the theory and application of computer graphics.

Ryan will receive a plaque, an announcement as this year’s dissertation awardee in the Graphics Interface proceedings, and a prize of $1,000. He has also been invited to present his research at Graphics Interface 2022.

Ryan was a PhD student in the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Computer Graphics Lab from 2014 to 2021, and advised by Professor Christopher Batty.

“I was lucky to have Ryan as the first PhD student to join my group at Waterloo,” Professor Batty said. “His commitment to excellence and infectious enthusiasm for research made him a pleasure to advise. The fact that his research was published in two papers at SIGGRAPH, the top academic computer graphics conference, and incorporated into SideFX’s award-winning visual effects software, Houdini, speaks to the quality and impact of his contributions. I am thrilled to see him receive this well-deserved recognition.”

Ryan is currently a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs in Zurich, working at the intersection of simulation, graphics, computer vision, and machine learning.

This animation illustrates Ryan’s work on variable viscosity.

A chocolate bunny melts by pouring hot liquid onto it. Heat diffusion is mimicked at each time step by transferring temperature from the particles to the grid, applying a simple blurring pass over the grid-based temperature field, and finally transferring the updated temperature back to the particles.

Adaptive Viscous Liquids, presented at SIGGRAPH 2019

Ryan’s doctoral research addressed several challenges in computer animation of fluids. He first explored simulating highly viscous liquids efficiently, a fundamental phenomenon that arises in many animation applications from simulating honey coiling and chocolate melting to paint dripping and lava flowing.

Ryan’s experience as a part-time 3D developer at SideFX Software revealed that the viscous liquid tools in Houdini were underused by animators because they were glacially slow. He accelerated them by adopting a natural approach — use of spatially adaptive octree grids. Because the interior of viscous liquids tends to be smooth, the domain can be discretized using large grid cells on the interior for efficiency and fine cells near the surface to capture intricate details.

The so-called T-junction structures occurring at resolution changes in octrees make deriving a computationally efficient and mathematically convergent formulation highly nontrivial. Ryan’s work showed that instead of using standard finite difference or finite element methods, expressing the partial differential equations for viscosity in an octree-based variational finite difference form leads to a simulator with a range of practical benefits, most importantly that the linear solve times are reduced by up to an order of magnitude.

Ryan’s method was shipped as a key new feature in Houdini v18.5. The underlying variational octree finite difference technique he introduced is highly generalizable, and could potentially be applied to enable efficient octree adaptivity for a wide range of solvers, including solid elasticity, granular flows, stream function solvers, Stokes flows, and more.

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

Applications open for Concept's Cornerstone program

A message from Concept.

Applications are now open for Concept's Cornerstone program. Cornerstone is the culmination of the student entrepreneurial process. The program will take participants through a term-long journey and provide extensive guidance to help with customer discovery and validation. 

The program will include:

• Founder Roundtables: Conversational weekly sessions with fellow founders and coaches to share stories and learn from their mistakes. 
• Expert advice: get invited to talks on how to reach customers, what to consider when raising funding, and how to protect IP.
• One-on-one coaching
• Cornerstone Demo Day: Pitch in front of investors and incubators

We are looking for student teams who are actively pursuing entrepreneurship as a career with the intention of launching a company while still in school or soon after graduation.

Applications close on Sunday, May 15.

Find out if you are eligible and how to apply.

Test of the campus emergency communication system coming May 17

A message from Information Systems & Technology.

A test of the University’s emergency communication system is scheduled for Tuesday, May 17 at 2:00 p.m. Test activation and deactivation messages will be sent using the below channels: 

• Tweets to @UWaterloo and @WatSAFEapp
• WatSAFE mobile app
• The ‘WatSAFE Desktop Notification’ on-screen pop-up for desktops and laptops
• Portal alerts and push notifications

In the event of a real emergency during this test, please contact Police Services at 519-888-4911, or ext. 22222.

Be sure to install the WatSAFE app on your device and WatSAFE Desktop Notification tool on your desktop/laptop to receive this test message, and more importantly, to stay informed of campus emergency situations. Visit the WatSAFE website for more details.

Tuesday's notes

Attention faculty and instructors: The application form for the Writing and Communication Centre's course-integrated support is now available online. "We offer five unique support streams for your courses including synchronous and asynchronous workshops and monitored discussion boards," says the WCC. "The course-integrated support (CIS) program supports faculty, (student) associations, and research groups in writing and multimodal practices in their respective virtual and/or classroom learning environment."

The CIS team promotes a collaborative approach with the instructor, student- led leader, or research member, to identify what ways Writing and Communication Centre can assist in fulfilling the needs of the course, (student) association, or the research group. 

The Writing and Communication Centre drop-ins are back at the Library. In-person drop-in peer tutoring is back at Dana Porter Library. Bring any writing or communication assignment and get support from the WCC's friendly and experienced peer tutors. Drop-ins run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 12 noon to 3:00 p.m. from May 10 to August 10. More information about drop-ins is available on the WCC website.

The Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business is hosting an online webinar for its part-time Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program. Attendess will get an overview of MBET with a focus on the part-time program experience. This session will include a live Q&A to give attendees a chance to get answers to their question from a member of the recruitment team.  

The Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) is a graduate entrepreneurship master's program that combines interdisciplinary courses with practical experiences in venture creation and commercialization. In MBET, students learn inside and outside the classroom. Networking, practical experience, and hands-on learning with like-minded people in the Waterloo entrepreneurship community that complement the core Master's-level courses inside the classroom.

The event will be held on Zoom on Wednesday, May 11 at 5:00 p.m.