Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Previous | Next

• The Velocity $25K competition is back
• Nominations open for excellent online teaching, course design awards

• Teaching Innovation Incubator seeks instructors to join the spring 2025 Creator+ pilot

• Computer Science doctoral candidate awarded 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship

• Special presentation to address transparency in animal research

The Velocity $25K competition is back

A message from Velocity.

Witness bold pitches, connect with founders, and experience innovation in action as they compete for the $25K grand prize.

The Velocity Pitch Competition (VPC) provides equity-free funding to early-stage startups to help remove some of the barriers that hinder innovation and entrepreneurial growth. This year, the competition features a first-place award of $25,000, bringing together exceptional current and past Waterloo founders to compete head-to-head.

Join us to witness ambitious startups as they pitch their groundbreaking ideas, providing a glimpse into the future of innovation. The competition also serves as a platform to support Velocity's most promising new founders as they present their ventures, offering encouragement and recognition for their entrepreneurial endeavours.

Register to attend.

Learn about this year's VPC Finalists.

Nominations open for excellent online teaching, course design awards

A message from the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL).

Every year, the Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic and the Centre for Extended Learningrecognize the great work that Waterloo’s instructors are doing in the digital classroom. Please help us identify these remarkable people and courses by nominating an online instructor or an online course for an Online Teaching Award.

Were you a student in a fully online (ONLN) course this term or last term? If you had an exceptional learning experience in your online course, consider nominating your instructor for the Excellence inOnline Teaching Award. Did you feel that the design of your online course was exceptional?  Consider nominating the course for the Excellence in Online Course Design Award.  

Note that the deadline for 2025 nominations is August 31, 2025.

Teaching Innovation Incubator seeks instructors to join the spring 2025 Creator+ pilot

A message from the Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic.

The Teaching Innovation Incubator, in collaboration with Instructional Technologies and Media Services is continuing its investigation of Creator+ into the Spring 2025 term, and we are seeking instructors who are teaching in the upcoming spring and fall terms who would be interested in trying out Creator+ with their students and joining the pilot. This is the last opportunity to participate in the Creator+ pilot and provide your feedback – a decision will be made about its long-term use at UWaterloo in the fall.

What is Creator+?

Creator+ is an embedded LEARN tool that allows for the creation of interactive digital course content. Elements such as embedded practice exercises, interactive course design elements, and video integration, among others, can be created in Creator+. For instructors who have used or heard of tools like Mobius or H5P before, Creator+ offers similar interactive products which are intended to better engage learners in the blended learning environment. 

Many instructors at Waterloo have participated in iterations of the Creator+ pilot and have had great success in designing content that is better engaged with by students. Check out the Creator+ showcase website to see some use cases of how Creator+ has been employed in distinct disciplinary contexts such as AFM 451, REC 101 and KIN 104L.

How do I register for the Creator+ pilot?

If you are an instructor and are interested in participating in the Creator+ pilot or learning more about Creator+, please complete the expression of interest form and someone from the project team will be in contact. Once selected to join the pilot, you’ll receive documentation, resources, and training on the Creator+ tool.

For additional information about the Creator+ pilot please reach out to tii@uwaterloo.ca.

Computer Science doctoral candidate awarded 2024 IBM PhD fellowship

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

Vasisht Duddu is one of 24 recipients internationally and one of two from Canada to receive a 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship. Established in 1951, these competitive graduate fellowships recognize and support outstanding PhD students around the world.

As an awardee, Vasisht will receive a $25,000 USD stipend and the opportunity to intern with IBM to improve his understanding of industrial research, broaden his range of technical contacts, and strengthen his technical experience. The last time a Canadian earned this distinction was in 2021 and, notably, the student was also a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

“I am delighted that Vasisht has been awarded an IBM Fellowship,” said Vasisht’s advisor and Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor, N. Asokan. “He is an exceptionally strong researcher with a deep understanding of machine learning security. He is also incredibly motivated. Even as an undergraduate, Vasisht sought out international partnerships. And as a graduate student, he has contributed to high-impact research published in top-tier conferences with me and researchers at other institutions.”

About Vasisht Duddu’s research

Vasisht’s research addresses a critical question in machine learning, namely how can trust in machine learning algorithms be improved in the presence of adversarial risks. He explores this research question from the perspective of unintended interactions between machine learning defences and risks. While several defences have been proposed to enhance trust in machine learning, they may inadvertently increase susceptibility to other unrelated risks.

With Professor N. Asokan and Intel research scientist Sebastian Szyller, Vasisht co-authored a systematization of knowledge paper that developed a framework to identify and explain interactions between defences and risks, as well as conjecture about unintended interactions. This research received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 45^th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and led to Amulet, an open-source library supported by Intel to evaluate unintended interactions, underscoring the industrial impact of his research. To mitigate unintended risks, he is examining effective strategies to combine existing defences to protect against multiple risks simultaneously.

Despite designing effective defences, it is important to determine whether a defence has been implemented honestly and correctly by untrusted practitioners. Specifically, how can technical mechanisms be designed to ensure regulatory compliance.

To this end, Vasisht is developing machine learning property attestations, technical mechanisms that allow practitioners to prove key properties of their models, training data, and configurations to verifiers. His approach uses machine learning, cryptographic techniques, and trusted hardware to enable companies to validate their claims. This work resulted in a paper titled Attesting Distributional Properties of Training Data for Machine Learning, presented at ESORICS 2024, the 29^th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, as well as another paper under submission. Additionally, his paper on ownership verification of graph neural networks, titled GrOVe: Ownership Verification of Graph Neural Networks using Embeddings, was presented at the 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the premier forum for developments in computer security and electronic privacy.

Special presentation to address transparency in animal research

A message from the Office of Research.

Faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend a special presentation and Q&A with Dr. Michael Brunt on transparency in animal research on April 3. 

Dr. Brunt is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow and NSERC Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Population Medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. He completed a PhD in Applied Animal Biology from the Animal Welfare Program at the University of British Columbia. 

While his love for animals and curiosity with science steered him towards this formal academic training, his fascination with people has drawn him to research the human component of animal welfare.  

Read more about Dr. Brunt and register to attend the event.