Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Waterloo people invested in Order of Canada

The latest Order of Canada Investiture Ceremony took place on Thursday, February 22, at Rideau Hall with two University of Waterloo members receiving their awards. Presiding over the ceremony was Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada.

Frances Westley, professor emeritus and formerly the J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation at Waterloo, was named a member of the Order of Canada in January 2021. She is an author, consultant, and renowned scholar in the areas of social innovation, inter-organizational collaboration, and strategies for sustainable development. Westley’s honour is the result of her global contributions to the study and implementation of social innovation.

Eric Haldenby, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Architecture, was named a member of the Order of Canada in January 2022. He is a Waterloo graduate and served as director of the School of Architecture from 1988 to 2013. The founder of Waterloo’s highly successful Rome program, Haldenby has conducted archaeological work in Italy, Malta and Tunisia. He is an expert in Mediterranean archaeology and the design and management of historic landscapes and sites.

Members of the Order of Canada are honoured for distinguished service in or to a community, group or field of activity.

In total, one Companion, 17 Officers and 42 Members were invested with the Order of Canada during the ceremony.

(photo credits: MCpl Matthieu Racette, Rideau Hall © OSGG, 2024)

Catch some deals at the annual Goose is Loose clearance sale

A message from Print + Retail Solutions.

The Goose is Loose and they’ve marked down so many items at W Store! Starting March 18, be ready to shop our biggest and newest clearance items up to 50 per cent off.

Shop the sale in W Store | South Campus Hall and don’t miss out on some great deals on rugby shirts, winterwear, fleece sweaters, vintage collection and more! All purchases made in-store will be entered into a raffle to win 1 of 5 classic UWaterloo hoodies. Don’t wait - popular items go quick and select styles are only available while quantities last.

Select discounted items are also available to shop online.

Going top shelf with AI to better track hockey data

Bounding boxes are used to identify players as they move on the ice in broadcast game video.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo got a valuable assist from artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help capture and analyze data from professional hockey games faster and more accurately than ever before, with big implications for the business of sports. 

The growing field of hockey analytics currently relies on the manual analysis of video footage from games. Professional hockey teams across the sport, notably in the National Hockey League (NHL), make important decisions regarding players’ careers based on that information. 

“The goal of our research is to interpret a hockey game through video more effectively and efficiently than a human,” said Dr. David Clausi, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Systems Design Engineering. “One person cannot possibly document everything happening in a game.”

Hockey players move fast in a non-linear fashion, dynamically skating across the ice in short shifts. Apart from numbers and last names on jerseys that are not always visible to the camera, uniforms aren’t a robust tool to identify players — particularly at the fast-paced speed hockey is known for. This makes manually tracking and analyzing each player during a game very difficult and prone to human error. 

The AI tool developed by Clausi, Dr. John Zelek, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Systems Design Engineering, research assistant professor Yuhao Chen, and a team of graduate students use deep learning techniques to automate and improve player tracking analysis.

The research was undertaken in partnership with Stathletes, an Ontario-based professional hockey performance data and analytics company. Working through NHL broadcast video clips frame-by-frame, the research team manually annotated the teams, the players and the players’ movements across the ice. They ran this data through a deep learning neural network to teach the system how to watch a game, compile information and produce accurate analyses and predictions.

When tested, the system’s algorithms delivered high rates of accuracy. It scored 94.5 per cent for tracking players correctly, 97 per cent for identifying teams and 83 per cent for identifying individual players. 

The research team is working to refine their prototype, but Stathletes is already using the system to annotate video footage of hockey games. The potential for commercialization goes beyond hockey. By retraining the system’s components, it can be applied to other team sports such as soccer or field hockey. 

“Our system can generate data for multiple purposes,” Zelek said. “Coaches can use it to craft winning game strategies, team scouts can hunt for players, and statisticians can identify ways to give teams an extra edge on the rink or field. It really has the potential to transform the business of sport.” 

More information about this work can be found in the research paper, “Player tracking and identification in ice hockey”, published recently in the journal Expert Systems With Applications.

See you at the Nexus: the senior undergraduate exhibition

A message from the Department of Fine Arts.

The Department of Fine Arts invites you to the opening reception for the 50^th senior undergraduate exhibition at the University of Waterloo. Hosted by the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, the exhibition captures the students’ creativity and the diversity of practices they have been exposed to in the studio arts program.

nexus: a connection or link between things, persons, or events especially that is or is part of a chain of causation.

The class shares the following statement:

“As students, we have made a complicated series of connections over the years through various mediums and disciplines that expose who we are as individual artists as well as a collective student body. Our culminating exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, installations, mixed media, and digital works that explore themes relevant to our interests in identity, community, self-expression, memory, trauma, relationships, gender, and the otherworldly. As students, we experienced online learning in the early stages of our studies before returning to our shared studio space in East Campus Hall. As a cohort, we have overcome isolation and formed unique bonds with our artistic spirit and each other.”

The exhibition will feature artwork by Nathan Bao, Jaynie Bowler, Paola Fernanda Condo Salazar, Taylor Darling, Kali Dunlop, Andrea Filiatrault, Audicy Giroux-Chodzinski, Samiha Hassan, Francis Keating, Brynn Kirbyson, Jee-in Lee, Isabella Maletic, Ro Miles, Thompson Nguyen, Deborah Odia, Jennifer Phovixay, Sabira Potokovic, Ariel Rossiter, Peyton Sarbadhikari, Maggie Sweeney, Natalie Szwec, Samantha Tu, Salem Velasquez, Echo Vettoretto, Jialing Wu, and Damla Yarar.

The opening reception takes place on Thursday, March 21 from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in East Campus Hall 1239, with opening remarks at 6:00 p.m. The exhibition runs from March 21 to April 6.

Please join us in celebrating this anniversary showcase of undergraduate creativity, resiliency and achievement.