Friday, January 16, 2026

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• It's the last week to submit a proposal for the Teaching and Learning Conference
• Reminder: Waterloo is a smoke-free campus
• Freda Shi and colleagues win outstanding paper award
• Friday's notes

It's the last week to submit a proposal for the Teaching and Learning Conference

There's still time to submit a proposal for the University of Waterloo’s Annual Teaching and Learning Conference, taking place April 30, 2026. The 2026 conference theme is “The Human Factor: Shaping the Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Higher Education."

"For our 17^th annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference, we will focus on the role of AI in teaching and learning and our role in shaping its use in higher education; whether novices or experts, we have the power to shape AI’s role on our campus, by asking questions, sharing insights, and creating meaningful learning experiences," says a note from the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE). "We ask: How best do we embed AI tools into our courses, and champion new approaches to teaching and assessments of learning to better address the learning needs of our students? When best do we prioritize foundational knowledge and skills versus higher-order learning outcomes? In what ways can we enhance student belonging and authentic emotional and intellectual connections? And how might we work together with AI to improve education? How do we maintain the integrity of assessments, given tools that can complete various assignments are almost undetectable? How do we continue championing accessibility, equity, diversity, and inclusion with Large Language Models (LLMs) that are biased and exclude important voices?"

"We invite you to submit proposals for presentations, panel discussions, workshops, alternative sessions, and posters that address these questions. We also welcome proposals from recipients of Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) grants. Again, this year, we invite proposals for pre-conference workshops and panels which will be held online prior to the conference on Wednesday, April 29, 2026."

For more information, check out the Call for Proposals website. The deadline is Monday, January 19 at midnight.

Reminder: Waterloo is a smoke-free campus

As of May 1, 2025, the University of Waterloo officially became a smoke-free environment. All designated smoking areas (DSAs) were removed, and smoking of any kind is not permitted on campus, which includes tobacco, cannabis, and products that produce smoke or vapour. Exceptions apply for Indigenous ceremonies and traditions and to individuals with medical accommodations.

For those who would like to stop smoking, the Smoke-Free Waterloo website contains smoking cessations supports.

By promoting a smoke-free campus, we’re working together to create a healthier place to live, learn, and work. Thank you for your cooperation.

Freda Shi and colleagues win outstanding paper award

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

Professor Freda Shi and her collaborators Changbing Yang, Franklin Ma and Jian Zhu from the University of British Columbia have received an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2025, the 30^th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Their paper, LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists?, introduced a new benchmark that evaluates how effectively large language models can perform meta-linguistic reasoning.

“Congratulations to Freda and her colleagues,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Their research offers valuable insight into how well large language models can interpret and reason in low-resource languages, and opens promising avenues for linguistic analysis and language documentation.”

Freda Shi is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and a Faculty Member at the Vector Institute, where she holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Her research interests are in 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, effective, safe and trustworthy NLP systems. She is particularly interested in learning language through grounding, computational multilingualism, and related machine learning aspects.

Professor Shi leads the CompLING Lab, a research group dedicated to exploring human language through computational methods.

More about this award-winning research

Researchers are exploring how large language models can assist and accelerate scientific discoveries, but comparatively little work has examined how LLMs can advance the social sciences. LLMs capable of reasoning about meta-linguistic knowledge have the potential to become powerful tools for language documentation, linguistic hypothesis testing, and typological research.

Linguists often generalize across languages by examining structures such as morphology, syntax and word order. Models with strong meta-linguistic reasoning could assist this process. Examples include proposing morpheme segmentations (breaking words into their smallest meaningful units), supplying glosses for each morpheme (explanations of what each morpheme means), identifying patterns or counterexamples to test hypotheses, and comparing structural features across languages.

To this end, Professor Shi and her colleagues developed LingGym, a task-oriented benchmark that evaluates the capacity of LLMs for meta-linguistic reasoning using interlinear glossed text (a way of presenting a sentence from one language with a word-by-word or morpheme-by-morpheme breakdown directly underneath) and grammatical descriptions extracted from 18 endangered and low-resource languages.

Unlike previous work focused on specific downstream tasks, LingGym evaluated whether LLMs can generalize linguistic inference across low-resource languages and structures not seen during their training. The researchers conducted a controlled evaluation known as word-gloss inference, in which models infer a missing word or gloss from context, with inputs that vary in how much structured linguistic information is provided, such as gloss lines, grammatical explanations and translations.

The researchers found that incorporating structured linguistic cues leads to consistent improvements in reasoning performance across all models. Their results highlight both the promise and current limitations of LLMs for typologically informed linguistic analysis and low-resource language documentation.

The research team plans to expand LingGym to support more diverse and in-depth use cases, particularly for endangered and low-resource languages. To help support LLM-assisted linguistic research broadly, their LingGym benchmark is freely available on GitHub.

Friday's notes

The Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) is hosting three Generative AI (GenAI) workshops in January and February:

• Integrating GenAI in Assessments - In Person (CTE7551), Tuesday, January 27, 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon, MC 2036.

​​AI capabilities are rapidly advancing, now matching or exceeding student-level work across multiple domains such as writing, coding, and analysis. These developments are reshaping teaching practices and course dynamics, prompting educators to rethink assessments, redesign curriculum, and equip students with the skills needed to effectively navigate and leverage AI in their future careers.  

• Indigenous Perspectives on AI - Online (CTE7559), Thursday, February 12, 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., online.

AI is rapidly changing the education landscape and the overall student experience in higher education. Join us as we discuss Indigenous perspective on AI, balanced with a review of the Critical AI framework & theories and AI as another wave of colonialism. 

• Accessibility and GenAI - Online (CTE7554), Tuesday, February 24, 12 noon to 1:00 p.m., online.

​This session is designed for instructors and staff who want to create more inclusive learning environments while navigating the opportunities and challenges of emerging AI tools. 

The UW Pre-Medical Society, UW Black Science, UW Pre-Dental Club, and UW Black Medical Leaders of Tomorrow are hosting a two-part writing workshop this month.

• Pre-Health Application Writing Workshop Part 1, Thursday, January 22, 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., B1 271.
• Pre-Health Application Writing Workshop Part 2, Thursday, January 29, 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., online.

In varsity sports news:

The Warriors Men’s Hockey team takes on Lakehead this afternoon at 2:30 p.m. in the CIF Arena.The game is part ofThink Pink Night, in support of the Canadian Cancer Society. There's still time to get your tickets.

The Women’s Hockey team faces off against Nipissing tonight at 7:00 p.m. also in the CIF Arena. It’s Think Pink Night, which includes a Chuck a Puck event, and Employee Day, with a limited number of free tickets sponsored by Hilton. Email WarriorsTickets@uwaterloo.ca for a coupon code. There will also be a “Domino’s Shoot for ZAA challenge. Buy your tickets to get a slice of the action.

Warriors Basketball will face Western on the evening of Saturday, January 17, with the women’s game at 6:00 p.m. and the men’s game at 8:00 p.m. Both games will take place in the PAC’s Carl Totzke Court. Think Pink Night continues with a paper airplane toss and hair donation opportunity. If you are interested in donating your hair or getting involved in support of the Canadian Cancer Society, please contact Armaan athcpmk@uwaterloo.ca. It’s also Residence Day. Buy your tickets today!