Thursday, June 6, 2024

Indigenous entrepreneurship: enriching communities

By Rebecca Wagner. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on Waterloo News.

Aspiring entrepreneurs have long benefited from the innovation ecosystem at the University of Waterloo, an environment where entrepreneurship and innovation excel amidst a unique blend of co-op, work-integrated learning opportunities and customized wrap-around supports. 

This traditional innovation ecosystem, however, wasn’t reaching the needs of aspiring Indigenous entrepreneurs.

In 2023, United College launched an Indigenous entrepreneurship incubator, Flint Hub, and a diploma in Indigenous Entrepreneurship (INDENT). Drawing inspiration from GreenHouse, Flint Hub provides the infrastructure to support Indigenous students in furthering their entrepreneurial aspirations. The incubator offers a vibrant community of support, rooted in Indigenous knowledges, values of kinship, abundance and reciprocity. 

Since its inception, Flint Hub has awarded approximately $20,000 in funding and supported three ventures, with many more opportunities on the horizon. 

Connie Roy, an Ojibway woman from M’Chigeeng Ontario and hairstylist of 17 years, is one of three Indigenous entrepreneurs who earned $4,000 in a recent pitch competition at United College will receive support to scale her business.

In 2018, Roy founded the first mobile hair salon in Waterloo region, Comfort Cutz, a convenient hair service that primarily serves individuals with mobility barriers. Through her work, Roy helps to give her clients confidence, while keeping them safe in the comfort of their own homes.

She sees her clients at their most vulnerable and witnesses first-hand the impact that her services have on their self-esteem and mental health. “My clients are so happy,” she shares. “For some, they get communication and a visitor. I treat them like they are my own friends and family, and they trust me.”    

“The Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island have always been great entrepreneurs,” says Rick Myers, principal of United College. “Colonialism repressed the entrepreneurial activities of Indigenous Peoples, but not their entrepreneurial spirit. Indigenous individuals and communities are making enormous strides in a host of commercial areas, including tourism, resources and energy.”

To accelerate this progress, Indigenous Peoples need access to a business education that reflects their specific commercial interests and their culturally unique way of engaging in entrepreneurship and economic development. There also needs to be an opportunity to learn directly from the experiences of Indigenous entrepreneurs, with Indigenous knowledges, values and culture as its foundation.

Flint Hub and INDENT: Supporting the entrepreneurship journey

INDENT is a six-course program that extends the resources and supports provided by United College into an academic offering and enables students to graduate with a diploma from the University of Waterloo.    

“Indigenous entrepreneurship programming goes beyond innovation to the very heart of economic equity and justice,” says John Abraham, academic dean of United College. “At United College, we see our role as supporting the next generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs as they write this exciting new chapter in a long history of commercial and entrepreneurial activities.”  

Jacob Crane, program manager of Flint Hub, adds: “The goal of the Indigenous entrepreneurship program is to shed light and guide students towards fully utilizing the tools they already have. Our role is to support them on this journey.”

Read the full article on Waterloo News

Registration open for Knowledge Gathering and Sharing Consultation Sessions for 2SLGBTQIA+ Communities

A message from the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism.

The Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism are hosting sessions for 2SLGBTQIA+ students, faculty and staff with special attention for those who identify as Two-Spirit, Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming (2STNBGNC+). These insights will play a vital role in shaping the new Trans & Queer Equity Strategy for our University. These consultations have been developed to provide a safe space to gather insights from different perspectives within our community, including students, faculty, staff, and key stakeholders.

For more information and to register, please visit the  Knowledge Gathering and Sharing for 2SLGBTQIA+ Communities  webpage.

Recreation and Sport Business students get their kicks in London

The Waterloo 'team' visits Lord’s Cricket Ground in London.

A message from the Faculty of Health.

Fourth-year Recreation and Sport Business students recently returned from London, England as part of an eight-day study abroad course — REC 472 (International Study Abroad in Sport Business).

The course offers a comprehensive look into the dynamic field of international sport business. Designed for upper-year undergraduate students, the course took 20 students, under the supervision of Drs. Katie Misener and Luke Potwarka, to London, a hub for international sport organizations, events and businesses.

“The days have been very full from morning to night, but the itinerary has been incredible and offered many unique opportunities for learning,” said Dr. Misener.

Students visited Loughborough University, Wimbledon, West Ham United Football Club, SportBusiness International, Marylebone Cricket Club, Lord’s Cricket Ground, Chelsea Football Club and the Association Football Club (AFC) Wimbledon.

“I could not be more proud of how well our students represented the University of Waterloo,” she said. “They were highly engaged throughout the entire course.”

Students explored new views on sports marketing, sponsorship, media rights, women and sport, event management, governance, community development and the socio-economic impacts of sport on global communities.

“The course is a significant experiential opportunity for students,” said fourth-year Recreation and Sport Business student Mathew Szeremeta. “You get to see in-person examples of the many concepts we learn in class being used in many different levels of sports organizations.”

Through engaging lectures, field visits and tours, interactive discussions and meetings with prominent sport organizations and venues, students developed firsthand insights into the global significance and rich cultural history of the sport industry.

“My favourite part of the trip was spending time together with the other students,” said Szeremeta. “It gave a family-like aspect to the trip, making every moment more enjoyable.” 

Celebrating Green Office challenge winners

Members of Renison University College's "Green Team."

A message from the Sustainability Office.

In January 2024, the Sustainability Office launched a new monthly challenge for participating Green Office departments. Each month, teams were encouraged to participate in or complete events and activities related to a different sustainability theme, such as employee engagement, energy conservation, and sustainable procurement. Congratulations to our winter term winners: Food Services, Institutional Analysis & Planning (IAP), Renison University College, Safety Office, and Waterloo Climate Institute! And a huge thanks to all our other participating departments for making the challenge a huge success.

The Green Office program is a network of more than 50 departments and 100 ambassadors who are leading sustainability initiatives across campus. Visit the Green Office webpage to learn more about the program and become an ambassador in your area!

Cybersecurity talk will address Machine 'Unlearning'

A message from the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute.

Join the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute for a CPI Talk featuring Nicolas Papernot, assistant professor of computer engineering and computer science at the University of Toronto. 

Dr. Papernot will discuss "Characterizing Machine Unlearning through Definitions and Implementations." The talk will present open problems in the study of machine unlearning. The need for machine unlearning, i.e., obtaining a model one would get without training on a subset of data, arises from privacy legislation such as the "right to be forgotten" legislation, a provision of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and as a potential solution to data poisoning or copyright claims.

The first part of the talk will discuss approaches that provide exact unlearning; these approaches output the same distribution of models as would have been obtained by training without the subset of data to be unlearned in the first place. While such approaches can be computationally expensive, we discuss why it is difficult to relax the guarantee they provide to pave the way for more efficient approaches. The second part of the talk will address if we can verify unlearning. Here, we show how an entity can claim plausible deniability when challenged about an unlearning request that was claimed to be processed, and conclude that at the level of model weights, being unlearnt is not always a well-defined property. Instead, unlearning is an algorithmic property.

CPI Talks are free and open to everyone regardless of affiliation. High school students and non-Waterloo students/staff are also welcome to join. No prior knowledge will be expected from the audience.

The event takes place on Thursday, June 20 from 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon in Arts Lecture Hall Room 113. Please register to attend on the CPI website.

About the speaker

Nicolas Papernot is an assistant professor of computer engineering and computer science at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute and is a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute. His research interests span the security and privacy of machine learning. Some of his group’s recent projects include generative model collapse, cryptographic auditing of ML, private learning, proof-of-learning, and machine unlearning. Nicolas is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars. His work on differentially private machine learning was awarded an outstanding paper at ICLR 2022 and a best paper at ICLR 2017. He co-created the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) and is co-chairing its first two editions in 2023 and 2024. He previously served as an associate chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), and an area chair of NeurIPS. Nicolas earned his Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University, working with Professor Patrick McDaniel and supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. Upon graduating, he spent a year at Google Brain where he still spends some of his time.