Monday, February 27, 2023

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• What Were You Wearing exhibit confronts myths about sexual violence
• Sepehr Assadi awarded 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship
• Global connections, forged in honey
• Monday's notes

What Were You Wearing exhibit confronts myths about sexual violence

A message from the Sexual Violence Prevention & Response Office (SVPRO).

The Sexual Violence Prevention & Response Office (SVPRO), in collaboration with the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Waterloo Region (SASC), is bringing the What Were You Wearing? art exhibit to UWaterloo. The exhibit is based on student-survivor descriptions of the clothes they were wearing when they were sexually assaulted. Sexual assault survivors are often asked, “what were you wearing?”, implying that what someone wears can cause a sexual assault.

This myth about sexual violence is used to blame survivors and justify the actions of those who cause harm. Survivors are never to blame for their sexual assault; everyone has the right to wear what they want. The intent of this exhibit is to bring awareness and attention to the pervasiveness of victim blaming and the harm and trauma it causes.

The “What Were You Wearing?” Art Exhibit was inspired by Dr. Mary Simmerling’s poem, What I was wearing and was created at the University of Arkansas in 2013 by Jen Brockman and Dr. Mary Wyandt-Hiebert. Oregon State University interpreted and created a virtual exhibit.

UWaterloo’s exhibit can be found in the SLC multi-purpose room on Tuesday, February 28 from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Wednesday, March 1 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. As part of the UWaterloo exhibit, SASC will be conducting a Responding to Disclosures of Harm training on Tuesday, February 28 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Everyone is welcome.

For more information visit the SVPRO website or contact Stacey Jacobs via email at s3jacobs@uwaterloo.ca.

Sepehr Assadi awarded 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship

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

Sepehr Assadi, who is joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Associate Professor in July 2023, is one of 125 recipients of a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University and a member of its Theory of Computing group.

Established in 1955 and awarded annually, Sloan Research Fellowships recognize researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments set them apart as the next generation of scientific leaders. In recognition of their distinguished performance, awardees receive a two-year $75,000 fellowship to further their research.

“Sloan Research Fellowships are an exceptionally prestigious award for early-career researchers,” said Raouf Boutaba, Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “We are pleased that Sepehr is among this year’s recipients and even more pleased that he is joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science, bringing his expertise in sublinear algorithms to our Algorithms and Complexity research group.”

“It is a great privilege and honour to be a Sloan Research Fellow, and I am very much looking forward to using this opportunity to continue my research on developing strong theoretical foundations that underpin real-world computer science problems,” Professor Assadi said. “I am also humbled by the amazing support I have received from the growing number of wonderful mentors that I have had throughout my career, including my nominators for this award, and I am grateful for their continued support.”

Professor Assadi studies the theoretical foundations of big data analysis. His research focuses on sublinear algorithms and lower bounds in various models of computation for processing massive datasets such as streaming, distributed communication, massively parallel computation, and sublinear time algorithms. More broadly, he explores algorithmic graph theory, communication complexity, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.

Professor Assadi’s research has resulted in 74 publications with a cumulative h-index of 23 to date. Of these papers, 55 were presented at top computer science conferences, including 21 at the top conferences in algorithms and complexity theory, namely the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, and the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. 

His publications have received multiple best paper awards at both theoretical and applied computer science conferences, among them the Conference on Web and Internet Economics in 2015, the ACM Symposium on Parallelism and Architectures in 2017, the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in 2019, and the International Symposium on Distributed Computing in 2020. 

More about Professor Assadi’s research

The field of sublinear algorithms encompasses the study of sublinear-space algorithms that have a limited amount of memory available during computation as well as sublinear-time algorithms whose runtime must be significantly smaller than the size of their input. These two broad categories of algorithms include streaming algorithms, sketching algorithms, property testers, local algorithms, as well as many others. Sublinear algorithms have been applied in all areas of computer science, and understanding their capabilities and limitations is among the most important practical problems in algorithms research today. The study of sublinear algorithms also yields fundamental insights into the nature of computation, and the mathematical techniques developed in this research also enable new breakthroughs in many other areas of theoretical computer science and mathematics.

Professor Assadi’s contributions include ground-breaking results on diverse topics covering sublinear-time and sublinear-space algorithms that are both theoretically important and practically relevant. 

Among his most famous results is the result presented in “Sublinear Algorithms for (Δ + 1) Vertex Coloring,” a publication that won the Best Paper Award at the 2019 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. In short, given a graph of degree Δ, it is always possible to colour the graph with Δ + 1 colours and this can be done with a simple greedy algorithm that has linear time and space complexity. But colouring graphs with algorithms that have access only to a sublinear amount of time or space is much more challenging. Determining the most efficient algorithms for the problem in various sublinear algorithm models is one of the central questions in algorithms research. 

Professor Assadi and his coauthors Yu Chen and Sanjeev Khanna introduced a novel technique called palette sparsification, which they used to obtain efficient algorithms for the colouring problem in various models of sublinear algorithms. Many of these algorithms provided the first non-trivial bounds of the complexity for vertex colouring in the corresponding sublinear algorithm models, and in many cases these algorithms were also shown to be optimal. This result has opened a new line of work on graph colouring problems with sublinear algorithms, and the palette sparsification technique has been influential in subsequent work in several research areas including sublinear algorithms, distributed computation, and graph theory. 

The maximum matching problem is another central problem in the study of sublinear and distributed algorithms, which has been advanced significantly in recent years through Professor Assadi’s research. Notably, in “Randomized Composable Coresets for Matching and Vertex Cover” — a publication that received the Best Paper Award at the 2017 ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures — he and Sanjeev Khanna, his PhD advisor at the time, introduced a two-round Map-Reduce algorithm that achieves constant factor approximation. This paper provides not only optimal algorithmic results and optimal complexity results, but also obtains results with practical importance.

Professor Assadi’s research also extends beyond the scope of sublinear algorithms. He has, for example, also solved a long-standing open problem in algorithmic game theory, proving the first gap between the communication complexity of truthful and non-truthful auctions.

He is also a mentor to the next generation of researchers. A recent example is “Deterministic Graph Colouring in the Streaming Model,” research he conducted with students Andrew Chen and Glenn Sun that was presented at STOC 2022, the 54^th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing in June 2022. His undergraduate students consistently rank him as among the best professors in their programs, citing his passion for computer science, excellence in teaching, and readiness to help students master course material.

Global connections, forged in honey

This article was originally published in the Fall 2022 issue of Waterloo Magazine.

Current student Amy Suresh (BSc in progress) chats with serial entrepreneur Nohemie Mawaka (BA ’13) about her most recent business venture, Lubembo, which brings Congolese forest honey to North American markets. 

Suresh: Lubembo sources forest honey directly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, making it distinctive not only in taste, but in origin. How has your commitment to your community helped support local agricultural farmers in Congo?  

Mawaka: That’s an easy one to answer! Most farmers working in agriculture in developing countries are women, and I definitely have a soft spot for that. We do have men working with us, but the majority of them are women.  

The hives that the honey is harvested from are at the very top of the palm trees. So, you can imagine these women climbing up there and bringing that down. It’s a bit dangerous, but that’s why it’s such a premium product.  

When we went back to Kinshasa where my dad grew up, we saw them do that. We reached out to them and said, “Hey, if we pay you fair market value, would you be willing to give us this honey?” They could keep selling it locally, of course — we just wanted a certain quantity. And they said, ‘yes.’” 

Essentially, we remove that fairtrade middle person, because we’re taking on the transportation, and that direct trade, and bringing all of that to the North American market. We started doing that every two months. We were able to create a consistent revenue stream in a country where, truth be told, a lot of populations deal with severe poverty. We’re even looking into a new model where we create the environment where the farmers can harvest their honey. So, we’re giving them the space, the equipment, the tools — everything they need to keep producing, in exchange for providing our business with a certain quantity. 

Suresh: Lubembo, have you been able to revisit or strengthen your relationship with your Congolese roots? 

Mawaka: Kinshasa is where we harvest and buy honey, and it’s where my dad was raised. The village has basically no infrastructure. So, when we bought that 200-acre farm, it’s the first one the people there have seen. We created incomes for 50 people in less than a year!  

While I grew up in the capital city, my dad was from this really rural area. I got to go back and really understand the people living there. It’s a bit emotional because I’m very Canadian. By going back, I’ve been able to unlearn a lot and just be a lot more empathetic. These are people who haven’t seen employment since we were free from colonization in the 1960s.  

When we visit, we know that the business isn’t going to happen overnight. So, in the meantime, we spend time with them. We cook for them, we host little barbeques for the community, and so it helps me connect with my roots, especially when it comes to understanding my dad’s side of the family. 

Suresh: Lubembo honey brings a unique customer experience from Congo to North America with its complex flavours and characteristics. What do you hope to achieve by building this bridge between the two communities? 

Mawaka: Ultimately, I want to be a bridge between the two regions. Congo is one of the most resource-rich countries in the world. So, we were really known for natural resources and it’s all untapped. When you look at North America, everything is so processed. Lubembo honey is kept raw, so there’s a bit more probiotic. In terms of taste, forest honey has a very smoky flavour.  

Overall, I want to offer organic goods that are overflowing in Congo. They have these products in abundance. And in the West, there’s purchasing power. We’ve had success in California, for example, so it really shows the value for Congolese products in North America. I hope to expand and introduce even more products from Congo long term. 

Monday's notes

This past fall, the Library hired a new associate director, Jermal Jones, who will oversee the EDIA portfolio within the Library and work to embed EDIA principles into all our services and processes. Learn more about Jones’ focus areas for the next two years on the Library’s website.

Open Education Week runs March 6 – 10, 2023. The Open Scholarship Committee is planning several events throughout the week to profile OE projects at Waterloo, promote the open community, and highlight support that is available for the creation, adoption, and adaptation of open educational resources. Learn more on the Open Education Week 2023 website.

The University's Senate meets today at 3:30 p.m. in NH3407. Among the agenda items:

From the Senate Executive Committee:

• A motion to appoint the Senate Executive Committee as the nominating committee to seek the next Chancellor of the University;
• A motion to elect members to Senate committees/councils.

From the Consent Agenda:

• A motion to approve the committee appointments for the Distinguished Teacher Awards and for the Amit & Meena Chakma Award for Exceptional Teaching by a Student, as presented.

Senators will also hear the President's report, the report of the Vice-President, Academic & Provost that will include an update to the 2022/2023 Operating Budget as well as operational updates, and the Library's annual report. The Vice-President, Research and International's report will include an update from Waterloo International.