Events

The Waterloo Engineering alumni class reunion in 2023 is taking place on June 2 and 3, 2023 at Alumni Weekend. The engineering Classes of 1963, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013 and 2018 are invited to campus to celebrate this milestone in their engineering career.

Rock This Town brings to life the exciting history of rock music concerts in KW from the 1960s and 1970s. An insider’s look into the gritty reality of building the local live music scene. This 70-minute documentary features interviews with music business pros plus performances by today’s musicians. Rock stars come and go but live music is here to stay!

Water and Energy Security in a Changing Climate Summer School

June 5 - June 23, 2023

Engineering Day 2023

Help shape the future of Systems Design Engineering!

All alumni of the Systems Design Engineering program (SYDE) are invited to join a virtual roundtable discussion on Wednesday July 19 or Thursday July 27 with the chair of the Department of Systems Design Engineering Dr. Lisa Aultman-Hall and select professors.

Waterloo Engineering and Waterloo Math are delighted to host an alumni reception in Seattle in October. At this pub and games night, you will enjoy great food and cocktails as well as fun games (billiards, ping pong & shuffleboard) while you personally connect with University of Waterloo alumni from Math and Engineering.

Cost is $15 per person. Each ticket includes two drinks, appetizers and games.

With recent waves of layoffs, high-profile workplace harassment cases, and a notoriously short career length for gender minorities and people of colour, the transition of new workers into the game industry involves navigating a spate of barriers to equity and success that have been understudied in academic research. The First Three Years is an ongoing longitudinal study of graduates of game programs in Canada and the United States, following the journey of 207 students as they move into the game industry. In this workshop, our research team will summarise the primary challenges students have identified in their game programs. This summary includes equity and diversity issues inherent in common curricular practices such as the efficacy of capstone courses and internships, the inclusion of crunch-like practices in the classroom, the systematic failure to inform students of actual workplace conditions, and the mismatch between student preparation and industry hiring practices. Afterwards, participants will address whether/how these problems manifest in their own institutions, and what solutions might improve equity outcomes for students seeking careers in games.

This event is part of the “ADE for Game Communities: Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ADE) in Games Research and Creation” series from the ADE Committee of the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, and is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

IPR Distinguished lecture featuring Professor Timothy Swager. Speaking on Intrinsically Porous Organic Polymers in Sensing and Catalysis

An enduring appeal of interactive entertainment media such as video games is that they invite the user to co-create the on-screen experience. More than an invitation, these experiences demand near-constant attention from players—and do so on myriad dimensions, including cognitive (problem-solving), emotional (affective reactions), apparatus (control or interface intuitiveness), exertional (physical activity) and social (attending to social agents). Individually and combined, these sources of demand are mediators for understanding the relationship between formal features of interactive media and intended (or unintended) outcomes of usage.

This presentation will present and review an interactivity-as-demand model based on prior and ongoing research into video games and virtual reality technologies, with specific implications for game design and player psychology.

Speaker Bio: Nick Bowman (PhD, Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the uses and effects of interactive and immersive media, with specific interests in social media, video games, and metaverse technologies. He has published more than

125 peer-reviewed manuscripts and co-authored more than 200 competitively selected conference presentations. He is the editor of Journal of Media Psychology and associate editor for Technology, Mind, and Behavior. Recently, he completed a term as the Fulbright Taiwan Wu Jing-Jyi Arts & Culture Fellow and the National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he was researching the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social demands of virtual reality experiences, including video gaming and digital advertising campaigns. He is a lifelong gamer, part-time mechanic, and an excited-yet-skeptical futurist.

What if we could make complex social and cultural questions playable? And what if we could do so through interactions with familiar digital interfaces set in alternative presents and near futures? The work I will discuss sits at the intersection between the design traditions of speculative and critical design on the one hand, and the philosophies and best practices of game design, playful media and interaction design on the other. It turns out, though, that an arranged marriage between these traditions produces unusual offspring. In this talk, grounded in examples including outsourcing religious tolerance to technological solutions, Indigenous Hawaiians undertaking space travel, matrimonial websites from the near future, and flirtatious AI chatbot therapists, I make the case for paratopian design, which is neither utopian
nor dystopian, but proposes paradigm shifts that invite us to reconceptualize and reconsider the building blocks of "here" & "now".

This event is part of the “ADE for Game Communities: Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ADE) in Games Research and Creation” series from the ADE Committee of the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, and is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. She directs the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre. Her work focuses on how playful media can improve daily life, and spans designing award-winning games, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, working with BIPOC communities to materialise inclusive futures, establishing foundations for recoverable, materials-based game design research, and articulating boundaries for experimental uses of AI.