The Waterloo Engineering Endowment Fund, believed to be the first and largest student-run endowment fund in Canada, has just passed the $10 million plateau. To mark the milestone students and others celebrated with cake in the foyer of Carl Pollock Hall on November 17. The fund, better known by its acronym WEEF, was created in 1990 by engineering students John Vellinga and Avi Belinsky to help fund student projects and support student teams above and beyond what was provided by the university.
Students apply award-winning data mining techniques
A team comprised of Waterloo management engineering students Helen Jiang and Sally Lee, and math students Larry Xing and Jonathan Yim took first place in the University of Waterloo Capital One Data Mining Cup held November 24. The goal of the competition was to apply data mining techniques to the problems associated with approving credit card applications and setting spending limits. The winning team used a simple but effective strategy of predicting customer spending patterns using decision trees and least-squares linear regression.