Future students

More than 160 competitors and volunteers took part in the recent spring Waterloo Engineering Competition. This term’s senior team design winners are Shahid Haider, Benjamin Tan, Yiling Wang, and Martin Lui, all of systems design engineering. The winners of the junior team design are Kumar Singh, electrical engineering; Ayush Kapur, mechatronics engineering; and Drupandh Manjunath, chemical engineering. The first place consulting engineering team include Amir Taleghani, Caitlin Speicher, Matthew Casswell, and Stuart Pearson, all of civil engineering.

Peter Douglas, director of the university’s UAE campus, was recently interviewed by Gulfnews.com about Waterloo Engineering’s unique co-op program which is manadatory for all engineering students in Canada, as well as the UAE. “The idea behind our cooperative education program is a work and study experience offering students much more than an internship,” said Douglas, a chemical engineering professor. The first 15 chemical and civil UAE-campus engineering students will join the 3A classes in Waterloo starting January 2012 and will complete their degrees in Canada.

The official launch of the newly established University of Waterloo Centre for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (CPAMI) took place July 13. Attendees included George Dixon, vice-president university research; Adel Sedra, dean of engineering; Manoj Sachdev, chair of electrical and computer engineering; and industrial partner representatives. The first director of the centre is Mohamed Kamel, an electrical and computer engineering professor. [DB article]

Waterloo’s Autonoumous Robot Racing Team took all four top awards in the International Autonomous Robot Racing Competition held July 23 and 24 at the University of British Columbia. The team received the overall grand award and won first place in the design competition, the drag race competition and the circuit competition. The team’s winning entry was a redesigned version of the vehicle that crashed just before last year’s competition. [race website]

Vanessa Bohns, who joined Waterloo’s management sciences department last month, has been attracting media attention with work she did at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Bohns and a colleague showed that posture has a lot to do with the amount of pain a person can tolerate. Adopting a dominant posture can make you feel stronger while adopting a more submissive posture can make pain feel worse. Bohns was interviewed on the CBC and her research has been included in the Toronto Star and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Mohammad Bozchalui, an electrical and computer engineering doctoral student, was recently honoured as the winner of MPrime’s award for Best Novel Use of Mathematics in Technology Transfer. MPrime, Canada’s only Network of Centres of Excellence for the mathematical sciences, brings together academia, industry and the public sector to develop mathematical tools vital to the knowledge-based economy. Bozchalui received his award at the seventh International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, which was held in Vancouver.

Collaboration between University of Waterloo researchers and Ontario businesses was officially celebrated August 9 in Engineering 3. Under FedDev Ontario’s Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative the University of Waterloo has received $750,000 to partner with businesses on a total of 16 research projects. Duane Cronin of mechanical and mechatronics engineering spoke about his research at the event attended by government and university officials. Cronin is working with Polefab Inc. to make traffic and lighting poles safer and more stable in accidents.

Working for Kraft cookie manufacturer Peek Freans sounds like a pretty sweet gig. For Kartik Vaideswaran, a 2B chemical engineering student, it was. That is in large part because of the extra effort he put into his job as an Engineering Assistant at the company’s East York bakery. His contributions helped to have a production line certified above three sigma, a first for a Kraft facility in Canada. As a result, Kartik has been hired back for his next co-op term. He shares his experience in a story written by Andrea Banerjee in the Spring 2011-2 issue of Inside sCo-op.