Friday, March 10, 2023

Eagle Staff Welcome Ceremony to take place on March 27

Indigenous Knowledge Keeper Myeengun Henry will introduce an Eagle Staff to the University of Waterloo in a ceremony on March 27.

"An Eagle Staff is an important element of the Indigenous relationship to mother earth and those that have protected it," says the text of the invitation sent to the University community on Monday this week. "The Staff reflects the wisdom, strength, and honour of those that carry it in representation of Nations across Turtle Island."

This Eagle Staff will be present at ceremonies and celebrations, such as convocation, representing University of Waterloo First Nations, Métis and Inuit community members, their traditions, cultures, and strengths.

"Through the introduction of the Eagle Staff, the University of Waterloo honours the responsibility to take on Indigenous perspectives, ensuring that they are reflected in the governance, structure, and intent of the University," says the statement from the University. "A symbol of Indigenous acknowledgement, the Eagle Staff will serve as a beacon of reconciliation throughout our shared future."

The entire university community is invited to participate in this ceremony on Monday, March 27 at 10:00 a.m. as Waterloo welcomes the Eagle Staff.

Register for the ceremony.

Co-op Students of the Year make a difference in changing workforce

By Asia Dale and Namish Modi.

Welcoming Ukrainian refugees, supporting out-of-this-world discoveries and creating more equitable research practices are just a few of the many achievements of the 2022 Co-op Students of the Year.

The University of Waterloo’s Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE) announced the award winners recently in a hybrid in-person and virtual ceremony.

“Our students continue to have a positive impact on our employers across various industries,” says Norah McRae, associate provost of Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE) at the University. “These exceptional individuals have demonstrated their readiness to enter an evolving workforce. I look forward to seeing how they represent the University post-graduation.” 

Waterloo partners with industry to create co-operative education that prepares students to become change-makers and leaders. The co-operative and experiential education program at Waterloo is the largest of its kind in Canada, with more students than the next five biggest Canadian post-secondary co-op programs combined.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 Co-op Students of the Year Award:

• Jeremy Ernest, Faculty of Arts, Master of Public Service
• Jennifer Tsai, Faculty of Engineering, Biomedical Engineering
• Breanna DeFreitas, Faculty of Environment, Geography and Environmental Management
• Rachel Almaw, Faculty of Health, Health Studies
• Alex Zhu, Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Financial Management
• Isaac Cheng, Faculty of Science, Physics and Astronomy

In recognition of the 65^th anniversary of Co-operative Education at Waterloo, CEE recognized one student for their exemplary performance during an international co-op term.

• Andrew Ding, Faculty of Environment, Geomatics

“Our students demonstrate the value of work-integrated learning experiences in their personal achievements and the amazing successes they have with the organizations they work with. Their work makes an impact on the local, national and global stage,” says Ross Johnston, executive director of Co-operative Education. “I’d like to formally congratulate these outstanding students for their incredible achievements in 2022!”

Read the profiles of the award winners

Computer scientists paint a picture of six decades of movies

From the sepia tones of a Coen brothers film set in the Dust Bowl to a child’s red coat in Schindler’s List, filmmakers have long known the power of colour in movies. Now, computer scientists have analyzed 60 years of films to paint a picture of the past six decades in film.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo used a technique called k-means clustering to analyze the trailers for more than 29,000 North American movies released between 1960 and 2019.

“We chose to analyze trailers because they typically include many key moments from a film while also being short and accessible to the public,” said Andreea Pocol, a PhD candidate in computer science at Waterloo and co-author of the study. “Trailers give us a reliable snapshot of a film, so we can extract a lot of data efficiently.”

Their technique produced both more general eight-colour palettes and more detailed 15-colour palettes, demonstrating the dominant colours for different data sets, which included specific films, genres and decades. They used the method to generate palettes for individual films—The Shining or The Matrix, for example—as well as groups of films, such as science fiction films or those released between certain dates.

Eight- and 15-colour palettes from various films of different genres and eras.

Notably, their algorithm improved on earlier analytical methods by eliminating skin tones and the grey of asphalt in order to more accurately represent the memorable colours used in films. 

The researchers found specific colours are prevalent in certain genres. As one might expect, the palette for westerns demonstrates that directors use the same muted earth tones regardless of era, while science fiction uses a lot of neon green.

“While movies in the 1960s and 1970s tended to use more saturated primary colours, the team’s analysis demonstrates modern technology has actually allowed directors to use a wider variety of colours in creative ways,” Pocol said.

The team’s ultimate goal is to use data science to help film industry executives understand trends in movie-making, including perhaps one day helping to predict a blockbuster or a flop.

“Computer science can improve the process of film production by offering tools that can help us know whether a film will succeed,” said Lesley Istead, adjunct assistant professor of computer science at Waterloo and the lead author of the study. “Part of that process is just getting a better understanding of film itself.”  

The study, The Colour of Horror,  appears in the Proceedings of the 19^th ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production.

An Open Educational Resource for the Canadian Economy

By RJ McArthur, Centre for Extended Learning. This article is one of a series celebrating Open Education Week. It is brought to you by the Open Scholarship Committee.   

For Dr. Barb Bloemhof, there were three main motivations for creating her open educational resource (OER), “Anything but a tariff: Visualizing alternative policies for the small open economy”: first, the OER allowed her to present a concept not often included in commercial textbooks; second, it allowed her to preserve material that “is at risk of becoming extinct” because of this lack of representation; and third, the online, interactive nature of the OER allowed her to present the material to students in a responsive, flexible manner not always possible in a conventional classroom. Dr. Bloemhof is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Economics.

Preserving an under-represented concept

Commercially available Economics textbooks are largely created for the American market. Needless to say, the economy of the United States is quite different from Canada’s, and as a result, conventional textbooks do not always reflect Canadian concerns. Bloemhof’s OER specifically presents a “particular chunk of trade theory” that is “valuable in [the] context of tariffs for small open economies,” such as Canada’s. By representing this concept, the OER will also help to “preserv[e] it for posterity.” Indeed, the project received an added degree of urgency when Bloemhof attempted to contact the professor who had first taught her the concept when she was an undergraduate — Dr. Bram Cadsby, Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph — only to learn he had passed away in February 2022. “I am dedicating the resource to the person who taught me this material,” Bloemhof notes.

Accessibility, nuance, and flexibility

Beyond preservation, the interactive, online nature of OER provides the opportunity to present the material in a more nuanced way than in a conventional classroom. As Blomehof explains, “in the resource, the policy choices available to the government of a small open economy are illustrated through a handful of diagrams, each having four captioned stages representing the economic theory. Staging the diagram in this way highlights the intuition behind the ‘layers of nuance added in each phase of the diagram’ that students can scroll through to see the subtle accretions of meaning at their own pace.” These fine points are often difficult to communicate or capture in a lecture setting, whereas the flexibility of an OER offers “a way to communicate this complexity.” Bloemhof notes that OER also allow for greater accessibility of content, as the “individual learner can go back to it again and again, with whatever technology aids they need.”

Support from Waterloo

The project was developed with the financial support of the inaugural round of OER Fellows Grants sponsored by the University of Waterloo Library. (It is now the Staebler Insurance OER Fellows Grant.) This grant allowed Bloemhof to hire a Research Assistant, Liuyuan Yue, and she also plans to engage students in providing feedback in the future. Bloemhof credits the Agile Development Team (ADT) at the Centre for Extended Learning for helping to “find language to bring things to be” in terms of currently available learning technologies. She states that the University of Waterloo felt like a particularly appropriate “home” for the project, given that there is “something about Waterloo that just seems oriented to anticipating where innovation could happen.” While the project is still in development with ADT, Bloemhof plans to share it with her discipline at the Canadian Economics Association meetings in the spring.

Distance between water molecules key for future quantum devices

This article originally appeared on the Faculty of Science news site.

Water has many unique properties. An interdisciplinary team of Waterloo scientists has discovered a one-dimensional chain of water molecules could produce a quantum phase transition. This breakthrough is a key development for future water-based quantum devices.

Water has a simple molecular structure - two hydrogen atoms on either side of an oxygen atom - but it also has many unique properties and can exhibit complex behaviours. Many of these behaviours are due to the hydrogen bonds and Van der Waals interaction between the molecules. The angle of the molecule also contributes to its permanent dipole where the hydrogen ends of the molecule are more positive and the oxygen end is more negative.

The molecules dipole strength can be manipulated. Recent studies have shown that water molecules can create interesting quantum phenomenon in lattices when the molecules are far enough apart that the hydrogen bond has no effect but close enough to experience the attraction of an intermolecular dipole interaction.

Waterloo chemists Dr. Pierre-Nicholas Roy and Dr. Tobias Serwatka, a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) postdoctoral fellow, collaborated with Dr. Roger Melko and Dr. Anton Burkov from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. They computed the phase diagram of a linear chain of water molecules after determining the ground and excited orientational states as a function of distance.

Using simulations, the team discovered that a short chain, of only 20 to 50, gaseous water molecules switches from having a random orientation to a highly correlated one.

Read the rest of the story on the Faculty of Science website.

Sustainability education panel discussion and other notes

As part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Action and Awareness Week, and in partnership with Environment and Climate Change Canada and SDSN Canada, the Sustainability Literacy Initiative is presenting a virtual 2-part panel on the importance of post-secondary sustainability education in creating a resilient workforce.

The "Sustianability Education at the Post-Secondary Level: Creating a Workforce for Tomorrow's Challenges" panel will highlight the role of education in creating a workforce to tackle tomorrow’s challenges effectively.

Beginning at 11:15 a.m., a panel of industry leaders will speak to the need for a generation of environmentally literate and sustainably minded graduates in the workforce. The second part of the panel, beginning at 12:15 p.m., will feature students, staff, and faculty speaking to existing initiatives at post-secondary institutions across the country that are working on advancing sustainability education.

On Monday, RAISE will be hosting a Vigil of Remembrance to commemorate those impacted by the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria. The event will include programming from Waterloo students, faculty and staff and the surrounding K-W community.

The vigil will take place Monday, March 13 from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the Student Life Centre's Black & Gold Room.