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Thursday, May 23, 2019

Is a robot a social being?

What makes a machine more than just a piece of hardware? Do we form relationships with our technology? How should we be teaching robots to act? And what are they teaching us?

These are just some of the questions that Kerstin Dautenhahn is exploring as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics. Dautenhahn joined the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering in 2018 to establish the new Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory.

Scientists have developed a radar system that can wirelessly monitor the vital signs of patients, eliminating the need to hook them up to any machines. Housed in a device smaller than a cellphone, the new technology records heart and breathing rates using sensitive radar waves that are analyzed by sophisticated algorithms embedded in an onboard digital signal processing unit.

Hackers at the University of Waterloo topped counterparts at more than 2,000 other schools to take first-place honours in a North American league for the popular invention competitions.

The result reflected the fact over 3,200 Waterloo students took part in more than 150 events supported by Major League Hacking (MLH) during the 2017-2018 season and finished in the top three at 30 of them.

David WangCuriosity may have killed the cat, but it’s what drives Professor David Wang of electrical and computer engineering who is celebrating 30 years as a professor and 35 years since arriving from Saskatchewan as a graduate student at Waterloo. When his graduate students try to determine a well-defined career path, he explains that the only way to success is by trying new things and often failing.