Monday, November 11, 2024

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• Today, Waterloo remembers
• Professors appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chairs at Vector Institute
• Neato graffito: Annual Eby Lecture will examine the intersection of paint and protest
• Electronic cover sheet focus group sessions this week and other notes

Today, Waterloo remembers

Today the Waterloo community, along with the rest of the country, will pause to remember Canada's war dead.

The official date of the Remembrance Day commemoration is always November 11, the anniversary of the day in 1918 when the guns fell silent at the end of the First World War. 

"Living in a free, open, and just society requires all of us to do our part," wrote President Vivek Goel in a blog post published on Friday. "November 11 is Remembrance Day, a reminder to honour those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of these freedoms. From communities across the country, brave men and women have served in both peacetime and war. Their efforts are why I wear a poppy this month."

"Remembrance Day is not only about those who fought in past conflicts but also those who have served and continue to serve in our armed forces today," President Goel writes. "These individuals not only represent Canada on a global stage, but they also represent our country’s unique promise of multicultural cooperation."

"We have a duty to do more than remember one day a year. As an institution of higher learning, this is a space to study, teach and share dialogue to examine the causes of conflict and explore solutions for peace. Every year, we ask our community to mark Remembrance Day with a moment of silence at 11:00 a.m."

Read the President's full statement

On campus, the MultiFaith Spirituality Resource Team (formerly the UW Chaplains) will be hosting a Remembrance Day event in the Student Life Centre Great Hall beginning at 10:40 a.m. that will run until 11:30 a.m. Myeengun Henry will lead the ceremony, with Gladwyn Badger from the Office of Indigenous Relations carrying the eagle staff. Students will participate in the event as flag bearers, and will also share prayers for peace from a variety of religions. There will be a reading of In Flanders Fields and a trumpeter will play the Last Post and Reveille. There will be two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m. The national anthem will be sung, and there will be an act of remembrance.

In accordance with the University's flag-lowering guidelines, flags across the University of Waterloo will remain at half-mast today to mark Remembrance Day. Flags on campus were lowered Friday to mark Indigenous Veterans Day, and remained down to mark the passing of the Honourable Murray Sinclair on Sunday, November 10.

Local ceremonies in the region:

The Royal Canadian Legion in Waterloo will hold a ceremony that begins with a parade at 10:15 a.m. at Regina and Bridgeport, with the ceremony taking place at the Waterloo Cenotaph on Regina Street at 10:30 a.m. The ceremony will be livestreamed.

Kitchener's parade, also organized by the Royal Canadian Legion, will start on Ontario Street at 10:30 a.m. and end at the cenotaph on Duke Street, with the remembrance service beginning at 10:45 a.m.

In Cambridge, the Preston, Hespeler, and Galt branches of the Royal Canadian Legion will be hosting ceremonies - in Galt, the parade begins at 10:00 a.m. with a service at 10:10 a.m. at the Queen's Square cenotaph.

In Stratford, the formal ceremony begins at 10:30 a.m., with a parade from the Stratford Armouries to the Cenotaph.

Check local media websites for more details about the ceremonies.

Professors appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chairs at Vector Institute

Professors Freda Shi (left) and Victor Zhong (right) in the Davis Centre.

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

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Freda Shi and Victor Zhong have been named Canada CIFAR AI Chairs and appointed as Faculty Members at the Vector Institute. They are two of three distinguished researchers in the latest cohort to receive this prestigious national recognition.

“Canada continues to attract some of the very best computer scientists to our vibrant research ecosystem, and these new Chairs are no exception,” says Elissa Strome, Executive Director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy at CIFAR. “Each of these researchers received their doctoral training elsewhere, but chose to come to Canada as faculty members because they recognize the value of Canada’s strong networks of talent, which is key to building a successful research program. This is further evidence that Canada’s AI talent strategy continues to attract some of the brightest minds here, to advance opportunities for Canadian-led research and innovation.”

Today’s announcement brings the number of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to 132.

“We are grateful and honoured to receive this support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Vector Institute. It is an especially exciting time to be doing research in machine learning and natural language processing,” Professor Zhong said.

“We are very excited to contribute to the thriving NLP community at the University of Waterloo, in the Greater Toronto Area, and in Canada,” adds Professor Shi.

Freda Shi joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science in July 2024 as an Assistant Professor after completing her doctoral degree at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Her research focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She works towards deeper understandings of natural language and the human language processing mechanism, as well as how these insights can inform the design of more efficient and effective AI systems.

Victor Zhong joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2024, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Microsoft Research in New York. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington. His research is at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning, and aims to teach machines to read natural language specifications to generalize to new problems. His work spans interactive learning, robotics, semantic parsing, and conversation agents. Examples of his work include learning policies that generalize to new environments by reading manuals, automated curriculum learning from language, and automatically generating reward functions from language for robotic control.

Read the full story on the School of Computer Science website.

Neato graffito: Annual Eby Lecture will examine the intersection of paint and protest

By Tasbiha Ansari. This article was originally published on the Conrad Grebel website.

“Graffiti tells us a lot about what people are thinking about, particularly people who might not have access to wider political or social conversations; people who aren’t in decision-making circles,” says University of Waterloo Peace and Conflict Studies Professor Eric Lepp. For the 2024 Benjamin Eby Lecture, Lepp will describe how graffiti and street art serve as valuable tools for examining social and political dynamics in conflict-affected societies. This year’s lecture is titled “Paint as a Protest” and will take place at Conrad Grebel University College on Thursday, November 14. The Eby Lecture is an annual event that presents the research of a Grebel faculty member.

Lepp will discuss how traditional research methods might miss nuances and details in people’s perspectives during conflict. He will include visual examples and case studies based locally in Kitchener, as well as from Northern Ireland and Cyprus. One case will focus on the red paint that was splashed on the Queen Victoria Statue in Kitchener in 2021. He will discuss the way that the message in this graffiti was amplified by the specific period of time in which it occurred. "To me, that symbolic red paint was a stark visual message that offered more value to discussions of a fraught Canadian national consciousness than any of the op-eds written in local newspapers or the calls for accountability that were being filtered towards me by my social media algorithms," Dr. Lepp said. 

Lepp has long been interested in street art and collaborates regularly with a group of scholars who have been engaging with graffiti in different conflict-affected societies since 2019. “The way graffiti, or a street art piece, can completely change the feeling of a space is really cool,” added Dr. Lepp. “As a researcher, I wanted to learn more about the way that paint on walls or statues can generate feelings of welcome and unwelcome in communities.” 

“In Peace and Conflict Studies, we teach that you can’t address the root causes of conflict if you take a top-down approach or focus your attention on the issues of elites,” Dr. Lepp continued. “Graffiti is often cast aside on the basis of illegality and vandalism by authorities, - and sometimes it is - but graffiti also provides a unique window into local perspectives and experiences. As a communicative practice, when we open our eyes to what is written on the walls around us, we can find messages of conflict, resistance, and disenfranchisement written by those who understand these issues best,” he continued. "The research that my colleagues and I conduct seeks to produce better methods for studying graffiti and to develop a deeper contextual understanding of what we are reading at specific moments in time.” 

Electronic cover sheet focus group sessions this week and other notes

The Research Systems and Analytics Team in the Office of of the Vice-President, Research and International and Information Systems & Technology (IST) are hosting Electronic cover sheet focus group sessions for researchers and campus approvers on Tuesday and Thursday this week via Zoom," says a note from the Office. "We are looking to hear your insights on how the system is working for you and any improvements you would like to see. We invite you to participate by registering for one of the Zoom focus group sessions."

Register for the sessions on the Office of Research website.

Welcome the winter season on Sunday, December 15 at the 36^th Annual Winterfest Celebration held at Columbia Icefield. "Bring your family, friends, or work team for a fun afternoon of skating, a hot chocolate bar, snacks, plus crafts and facepainting for kids," says a note from the University of Waterloo Staff Association (UWSA). "Entry is free for UWSA members and their families or other guests, and just $5 for all other UW community members and their guests. Get family or group photos for an additional $5.00 ($10 for non-UWSA members), and if you register by November 12, you can purchase wrapped, age-appropriate gifts for kids." The event runs from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Register and purchase add-ons on Ticketfi.

The Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE) is holding a public lecture today entitled “The role of renewables in our journey towards reducing GHG” that will feature Jean Roy, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Kruger Energy. The lecture takes place from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. in DC 1302 and will also be webcast on Zoom. 

"The integration of renewable energy sources and advanced technologies faces several challenges, including environmental concerns such as land use and habitat disruption, social issues like community acceptance and equity in energy access, economic factors involving the cost of technology and market viability, and regulatory hurdles that encompass policy frameworks and compliance requirements," says the talk's abstract. 

There's still time to register.

Information Systems & Technology (IST) has published the latest in the Atlassian Blog Series entitled Organizing Your Work in Confluence with Folders.