Thursday, February 7, 2019

Waterloo submits brief on changes to Copyright Act

This article was originally published on the Library's website.

The Canadian Copyright Act – which governs copyright law in Canada - has been under review for over a year. During this time, 183 briefs have been submitted to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Technology, providing recommendations around possible changes to the act, and aspects that are important to maintain. Among those briefs are a number submitted by universities, including the University of Waterloo.

University of Waterloo’s brief included four recommendations:

1. Retain education as an enumerated purpose in fair dealing.
2. Give copyright exceptions protection from contract override.
3. Maintain the cap on statutory damages for non-commercial infringement.
4. Avoid the unintended consequences of restrictive copyright law.
   1. Include the term “such as” in fair dealing, to facilitate flexible interpretation.

The brief was drafted in collaboration with the University’s Copyright Advisory Committee, and was submitted to the Parliament of Canada by the Office of the Provost.

All submitted briefs can be read on the Statutory Review of the Copyright Act website, which also hosts video of testimony provided to the committee throughout the review.

An update on the Workday Support Centre

A message from Human Resources.

For the past month, since the launch of Workday, the Workday Support Centre has been busy assisting employees with the transition to the new HR system. In January, we had more than 9,000 unique logins to Workday.

As of February 11^th, support for employees will continue to be available by phone (extension 33000) and email (workday@uwaterloo.ca), however EC1 1004 will no longer serve as a drop-in centre.

If you require hands-on assistance with Workday, you can book an appointment through the Workday email. Please see the table below for information on who to contact for which type of inquiries. For manager inquiries, contact your Human Resources Partner.

Human Resources Main Contacts

Professor receives Genome Canada grant

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

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Bin Ma has received $462,998 in research support from Genome Canada for an ambitious three-year project titled “Software for peptide identification and quantification from large mass spectrometry data using data independent acquisition.” Additional funds bring the total amount to $925,987.

The announcement was made by the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science and Sport, as part of a national announcement of $22.7 million. An additional $33.4 million is being invested by provincial governments, business and research partners.

Professor Ma and project co-lead, Professor Michael Moran from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, will collaborate to develop software to improve the efficacy of precision medicine — treatments that are tailored to individual patients so the best therapeutic outcomes can be achieved with minimal side effects.

“Precision medicine starts by detecting and measuring biomarkers — protein molecules in a patient’s blood or tissues that can be used to detect abnormal processes caused by a disease or to see how the body is responding to a treatment,” Professor Ma explains. 

Mass spectrometry is a commonly used analytical technique to quantify known chemical compounds, to identify unknown compounds within a sample, and to elucidate the structure and chemical properties of molecules. 

“We’ve seen tremendous advances in mass spectrometry, which has made it possible to detect and measure an increasingly large number of protein biomarkers,” he said. “The problem is that we lack the software to sift through this mass spectrometry data comprehensively.” 

To address this deficiency, Professor Ma’s research team will develop software to allow more sensitive and accurate protein identification and quantification using a method called DIA or data independent acquisition. 

With data independent acquisition, protein biomarkers in patient samples are measured comprehensively by mass spectrometry, providing a digital snapshot that can be analyzed after the fact at different time points. This technique has many advantages over the current data-dependent approaches that measure a subset of biomarker signals, Professor Ma explains. “DIA unfortunately comes at a cost — this spectrometry method generates vast quantities of data that can be analyzed only if we have software that can process huge datasets.”

This is exactly what Professor Ma proposes to create. “We will develop software to discover and measure disease biomarkers using data independent acquisition mass spectrometry techniques.” 

“Congratulations to Bin for receiving this generous and prestigious grant from Genome Canada,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “His proposed bioinformatics software will not only reduce healthcare costs, but it will also allow earlier disease detection and facilitate the selection of treatments optimized for each patient and his or her specific condition.”