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New financial awards give more students access to work-integrated learning experiences
By Matthew King. This article was originally featured on the Co-operative and Experiential Education website.
More students will have access to work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences, including unpaid experiences, thanks to new financial awards created by Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE) and the Centre for Work-Integrated Learning (WIL).
Paid co-op work terms are only one type of work-integrated learning experience at the University of Waterloo. Many students opt for other WIL opportunities, like EDGE - the University’s experiential education certificate program.
Although some of these WIL experiences are unpaid, they are equally valuable opportunities for students to gain work experience and build future-ready skills that complement their academic studies. These unpaid WIL experiences may be financially inaccessible to some students, especially in challenging economic times.
The awards will vary based on available funding and eligibility requirements with students receiving up to $1,775 per term. For spring term 2024, funding is available to domestic, permanent resident and refugee status students participating in:
- WE Accelerate
- EDGE Unpaid
- WIL Courses
CEE has secured additional funding for students. Energy company Enbridge has allocated funding to support students in WE Accelerate with a focus on women in STEM.
These awards will continue to be offered each term. However, the funding amount that students receive could change. This term, Co-operative Education, Work-Integrated Learning (CEWIL) Canada’s Innovation Hub (iHub) is funding a portion of the awards. The Centre for WIL secured two contracts with CEWIL iHub for more than $750,000 to help support our students.
“It removes a barrier to participation,” says McDonald. “We know there are numerous WIL experiences happening across campus. Our goal is to support our students who are already engaged in those experiences, or maybe struggling to engage in them, because of financial limitations.”
Ihab Ilyas receives C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award for advancing computer science
This article was originally featured on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.
Professor Ihab Ilyas has been awarded the prestigious 2024 C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award in recognition of his contributions to building large-scale machine learning systems for data integration, data cleaning and knowledge construction. Established in 2007 and named in 2012 after Calvin Carl Gotlieb, a founding figure of computing in Canada, the award celebrates outstanding Canadians whose work has significantly advanced computer science and engineering.
“Congratulations to Ihab on receiving this year’s Gotlieb Computer Award,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “This important recognition highlights his groundbreaking research on automatic error detection, data cleaning, and imputation of dirty structured data that has influenced academia and industry alike. His work on developing automated, large-scale data cleaning and integration systems has laid the groundwork for two successful start-ups.”
More about Professor Ilyas’s research
Professor Ilyas has made many substantial contributions to data management, from his work on pioneering new directions in information retrieval and rank-aware query processing to his more recent achievements in building AI systems for data integration and data quality. He has published many seminal papers at top-tier conferences on rank-aware query processing, data cleaning, generative AI models for data quality, and building large-scale knowledge bases. Many of his results have been commercialized successfully. His HoloClean project, for example, was the basis for the start-up company Inductiv. Acquired by Apple in 2020, Inductiv’s technology now underpins advanced machine learning for Siri and Spotlight, enabling next-generation AI search capabilities.
With respect to data quality, Professor Ilyas’s contributions led to the first system to use generative AI to model structured data for a variety of tasks from missing value imputation to detecting and automatically repairing errors to profiling dependencies in complex data sets. Known as HoloClean, this open-source statistical inference engine has been used by Fortune 500 companies, banks, census bureaus and large international insurance firms. This pioneering work sparked new research directions in the data management community and was among the significant contributions that led to Professor Ilyas’s fellowships in both IEEE and ACM. Professor Ilyas co-authored the leading text on data quality, titled Data Cleaning. This ACM Book serves as a reference for researchers and practitioners interested in data quality and data cleaning as well as a textbook for graduate-level studies.
In data integration, Professor Ilyas’s innovations have been commercialized by Tamr, a successful start-up that has raised more than $70 million in funding and employs more than 100 staff, serving major enterprises worldwide. His contributions in scalable record deduplication and schema mapping are at the core of the company’s technology.
More recently, Professor Ilyas led a large team at Apple to develop Saga, a next-generation knowledge construction and serving platform that powers a multitude of experiences for millions of Apple users globally. One of the most comprehensive knowledge construction and serving platforms today, Saga integrates novel techniques from data integration, semantic knowledge representation, machine learning for structured data, natural language processing, and scalable distributed query processing. The research on Saga has been presented at ACM SIGMOD, the leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users.
Monday's notes
The Kindred Credit Union Centre is celebrating 10 years of collaborative peacebuilding on Saturday September 21, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m., Grebel Gallery, Level 4 Conrad Grebel University College, 140 Westmount Rd N. Please RSVP, families welcome.
Speaking of peace...participate in a wide range of peace related events across Waterloo Region this September with Peace Week! Peace Week runs from the International Day of Peace to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. If you have an event between September 21 - 30 that you'd like us to promote, just let us know!
If you're looking to revitalize your fitness routine or looking for some support to start an exercise program, look no further. Fit Foundations 101: Form and Function is an introductory program for UW staff and faculty. It offers a thorough introduction to functional resistance training exercises, focusing on how to adapt them to your current fitness level and progress safely. Led by experienced fitness professionals, this class is an ideal way to kickstart your journey toward better physical health and well-being. Whether you're just starting out or looking to refresh your routine, this program provides the foundational knowledge and guidance you need.