Research chairs, awards and honours

Catherine Rosenberg

Professor Rosenberg leads a multidisciplinary team of experts helping industry leader, Cisco, in networking prepare for the introduction of 5G. The next generation of wireless systems, 5G is a family of technologies, including new frequency bands, that will enable faster data transfer and reduced delays for greatly improved wireless service. It is expected to power the Internet of Things, allow streaming to mobile devices even when users are travelling at high speeds, and provide reliable service for critical applications such as remote surgery and autonomous vehicles.

Anwar Hasan

The University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI), supports academic research, technical development, and innovation in blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital payments. In addition to financial resources, Ripple has committed to collaborating with university partners by providing strategic guidance and technical resources as needed. The University of Waterloo is the only Canadian participant in the initiative.

Zhou Wang

The amount of multimedia digital content at our disposal (such as videos, images and audio) has exploded in recent years. It is constantly streamed to millions of TVs, tablets, laptops and smartphones around the world. In fact, multimedia content is what shapes the Internet as we know it. A key challenge facing both the research community and industry is how to provide innovative solutions that will enrich and enhance human experiences when we consume this content.

Since human perceptual systems (such as our visual and auditory systems) ultimately determine how we react to and experience such content, designing multimedia creation, distribution and presentation systems that optimize the perceptual quality-of-experience for users is critical. As Canada Research Chair in Multimedia Quality-of-Experience, Dr. Zhou Wang is developing computational models that can automatically predict and optimize human visual quality-of-experience when consuming multimedia content.

Wang has already helped invent the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), which assesses perceptual visual quality. It has been widely used in the broadcasting and telecommunications industry to monitor and optimize the quality of video delivered to millions of users on a daily basis.

Now, Wang and his research team are using revolutionary, biologically inspired perceptual modelling and viewer intelligence approaches to develop new theories and technologies for end-to-end multimedia quality-of-experience measurement, optimization and intelligence solutions. These have the potential to reshape how multimedia content is processed, distributed and presented over communication networks. Ultimately, they will also improve individuals’ everyday perceptual experiences.

Stephen Smith

Dr. Stephen L. Smith, Canada Research Chair in Autonomous Systems, is working to develop the intelligence and planning algorithms that will power this next generation of robots.

His research tackles some of the fundamental challenges in creating robots that can seamlessly operate in human-centric environments.

Smith’s research seeks to create robots that possess several key capabilities. They should be capable of reacting to unexpected changes in the environment without delay.

They should improve their performance over time, leveraging their experience to predict future changes and re-optimize their plans. And, they should be able to communicate with users, understand the task they have been assigned, and even ask questions when more information is needed.

The goal of this research is to create robots that can be integrated directly into the current infrastructure, without requiring custom facilities. This would greatly expand the range of industries where autonomous systems can be deployed, enabling applications in agriculture, self-driving vehicles, flexible manufacturing and beyond.

Claudio Canizares

Professor Canizares holds a Research Endowed Chair in support of Hydro One activities, particularly in the areas of Smart Networks and Emerging Industry Infrastructure.

Loblaws is a major sponsor and contributor to the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute; the Research Chair in artificial intelligence is an integral part of their support for the Institute. The holder of the Loblaws Research Chair in AI is the current co-director of the Waterloo AI Institute, Professor Fakhri Karray. He is teaming up with a number of professors and researchers at the University of Waterloo to support Loblaws in its quest to become a world leader in applying Artificial Intelligence to inventory control, planning, purchasing and supply chain management.