Thursday, February 18, 2021

Rooted in History: A Celebration of Black History as Canadian History on February 26

The President's Anti-Racism Taskforce (PART) will be hosting a special event to mark Black History Month on Friday, February 26.

Rooted in History: A Celebration of Black History as Canadian History will include musical performances, a keynote address, and a panel of some of Waterloo's most formidable thinkers in celebration of Black History in Canada, and those trailblazers making history right here at Waterloo.

The event will highlight the achievements of Black Canadians and members of Waterloo's Black community while educating and mobilizing support around anti-Black racism.

Key participants at the event include:

• Feridun Hamdullahpur, President and vice-chancellor, University of Waterloo;
• Charmaine Dean, Vice-president, Research, University of Waterloo;
• Laura Mae Lindo, Member of Provincial Parliament, Kitchener-Centre, delivering the keynote address;
• Kathy Hogarth, Special Advisor, Anti-Racism and Inclusivity, VPRI and Associate Professor, School of Social Work, emcee;
• Aaron Francis, Equity Advisor, Graduate Student Association, panelist;
• Naila Keleta-Mae, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Arts, panelist;
• Christopher Taylor, Lecturer, Department of History, panelist;
• Vershawn Young, Professor, cross appointed English Language and Literature, and Communication Arts, panelist; and
• Rufus John, Kitchener-Waterloo Canadian-Caribbean vocalist.

The event will run from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. virtually on Microsoft Teams. Registration is now open.

German Studies travel awards go virtual

A message from the Waterloo Centre for German Studies.

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies is pleased to announce that our annual travel award applications are open. Though they're different this year because, you know, COVID-19.

At the moment, the WCGS is unable to make any awards available that involve travel. But thanks to the generosity of its donors, the centre can make awards available for students participating in virtual study abroad programs. This means that if a student at a Canadian university is participating in a program that usually takes place in Germany, but due to the pandemic is being held virtually online, the WCGS will accept applications for support to help defray program fees.

Any student planning on participating in a recognized institutional Canadian-organized German language or cultural studies program abroad between May 2021 and April 2022 may apply for the Stork Awards in German Studies. These awards are for full-time graduate and undergraduate students who will be participating in a recognized institutional, Canadian-organized German language or cultural studies program that would normally take place abroad. The awards are available to students in all disciplines. Deadline for applications is March 1. Visit the WCGS webpage for more information.

For any questions about scholarships, please contact Lori Straus.

A search engine for better disease diagnosis and treatment

By Brian Caldwell. This article was originally featured on Waterloo News.

Hamid Tizhoosh was looking for a new idea, a fresh start, when he began talking to doctors about how they do their jobs and how they might do them better. 

Six months into his consultations, with his engineering lab at the University of Waterloo reduced to a one-man show by a failed artificial intelligence (AI) startup, he heard something that almost floored him. 

Pathologists in the 21st century still rely on atlases — books of images from biopsy samples — and flip through them for potential matches to help diagnose new cases.

Really? Books of old images? That was it, the spark that sent the systems design engineering professor roaring down a productive new research path. 

“They were using a very Stone Age type of search,” he recalls. “When I learned that, I said, ‘For heaven’s sake, we should do this automatically. It is image search. Computers can do it.’” 

Seven years later, Tizhoosh has turned that basic concept into new technology he hopes will revolutionize health care by giving doctors a simple, powerful tool to help diagnose, treat and research disease via search in large medical image archives. 

Partnering with industry to secure $3.14 million 

And working with him to realize that goal is a local company, Huron Digital Pathology of St. Jacobs, that he approached for backing when his early work started showing promise. 

Huron is the industrial partner in a consortium led by Tizhoosh and researchers in his Laboratory for Knowledge Inference in Medical Image Analysis (KIMIA Lab) which secured $3.14 million in funding through the Ontario Research Fund: Research Excellence program in 2018. 

The money is important, but both sides stress the relationship goes well beyond Huron providing $500,000 for research over five years in exchange for commercialization rights. 

In addition to being a shareholder and AI advisor to the company, Tizhoosh helped hire its engineers and rolled up his sleeves to work booths at conferences and trade shows. 

“We lift the KIMIA lab up, the KIMIA lab lifts us up and, of course, the University of Waterloo is a fantastic calling card,” says Patrick Myles (BA ’87), the CEO of Huron. “We open doors for each other. 

“And on a personal level, Hamid and I almost finish each other's sentences. We’re both out there telling the story of how this wonderful technology can make lives better and doctors more efficient.” 

Search engine combs archives for close matches 

The technology at the heart of the partnership is essentially a specialized search engine that allows doctors to comb archives of digital images of tissue samples for the closest matches to new cases. 

The original images contain massive amounts of digital data, so search is only possible because Tizhoosh came up with a way of using AI to identify key features and convert them into bunches of barcodes. 

That reduces the size of images to a tiny fraction of the originals and indexes them, enabling the search engine to find matches in archives of millions of images in a split second using ordinary computers. 

“We designed the search from the beginning to be super-efficient, to do this without heavy-duty computational power,” Tizhoosh says. 

By finding similar images, the search engine instantly connects doctors to a treasure trove of information on old cases — the diagnosis report, the treatment plan, the eventual outcome — that is now just sitting in archives. 

Myles compares it to turning a giant pile of random books into a library structured and organized using the old Dewey Decimal System. 

“Our search engine unlocks all of the data that already exists,” he says. “It’s really a knowledge-sharing tool.” 

A hint of its potential came last fall when the KIMIA Lab was selected by the World Health Organization to contribute to a global research project on cancer categorization using its image-retrieval technology. 

Waterloo tech will modernize world’s largest tissue archive 

Around the same time, the United States military signed on as Huron’s first paying customer to modernize the Joint Pathology Centre, home to the largest collection of preserved tissue samples in the world. 

That deal put the project two years ahead of schedule in terms of commercialization, but Tizhoosh is convinced they have still only scratched the surface. 

He looks forward to the day the system is used everywhere — including areas of the developing world where pathologists are especially scarce — to virtually eliminate diagnostic error, personalize treatment plans and fuel drug development. 

“I think we’re only at the very beginning, to be honest,” Tizhoosh says. “I believe this is disruptive technology that will eventually touch every area of the medical field. 

“Even we don’t know what the full impact of image search in medical archives will be. Every time we talk to doctors, they give us new ideas.” 

Fiscal year-end is coming up

In a memo circulated on February 16, Finance reminded the University community that fiscal year-end is April 30, 2021. "The April 30, 2021 fiscal year-end is approaching, and it is important that all current year transactions are posted and reviewed in a timely manner," says the memo. "We ask for your assistance in meeting year end deadlines by communicating with your departments and ensuring that tasks in Unit4 are processed by end users as soon as possible after they are received." 

Follow these procedures and deadlines to help ensure the accuracy of the University's financial statements for year-end:

• Throughout the year, all transactions should be sent to Finance for processing as soon as possible and no later than the month following the completion of the transaction. Cut-off dates for each month-end can be found on the Finance website.
• Financial reports for your area of responsibility should be reviewed monthly throughout the year for accuracy and completeness.
• There are a number of actions required and deadlines for April 2021 transactions. See the full memo for details.

Academic units should contact their Faculty Executive Officer or Faculty Financial Officer with any questions. Academic support departments should contact their Financial Officer (if applicable), or the Finance contacts at the bottom of the memo. Finance would like to thank everyone in advance for their support.

Thursday's notes

"The 22 February 2021 Senate meeting will be held via Microsoft Teams videoconference," says a note from the Secretariat. "Guests are welcome to join the open session of the meeting similar to a normal "in-person" Senate meeting. If you would like to attend the meeting as a guest observer, please contact Emily Schroeder to request to join the meeting. All requests must be received by Friday 19 February 2021. The agenda is posted on the Senate webpage."

The next IST IT Seminar, IST-ITMS’s 2020, the year of “living in interesting times”, will take place on Friday, February 19 from 9:00 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. 'Instructional Technologies and Media Services (ITMS) provides the central facilities used for teaching and learning, from the classrooms, to the many educational technologies, to video editing, and more," says the note from the seminar organizers. "With up to 39,000 students and well over 2000 instructors making use of various in-person and online services in the two big terms (Fall and Winter), life for the team tends to be very busy. Then it got very interesting starting in late February of 2020. This presentation updates you on what ITMS does, and how areas of the group transitioned during the move to “remote teaching”, as the new mode of operating became known."

Speaking will be Andrea Chappell, the Director of Instructional Technologies and Media Services. Join online.