News

Research into green transportation in Ontario received a boost, thanks to a new partnership that lets researchers and drivers see how well electric vehicles perform. The new collaboration, called Drive4Data, is the first of its kind in Canada and involves the University of Waterloo's Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE) and FleetWise EV300, an initiative of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.

A research facility that will one day develop the technology that enables hybrid vehicles to feed energy into the power grid is among the innovative research initiatives at the University of Waterloo that will receive major funding. The Canada Foundation for Innovation announced January 15 that it is awarding more than $4.7 million to four research projects at Waterloo, including over $2.1 million for the Green and Intelligent Automotive Research Facility being established at the university.

Peter Carr of management sciences was featured in a recent Toronto Star article about the effects of Facebook going public after the launch of its initial public offering in May 2012. 

The article says the company has always struggled with how to continue making money from ads as people shift their computing to hand-held devices such as smartphones.

Duane Cronin, a mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor, is the new executive director for the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR). He succeeds Amir Khajepour, also of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, who held the position for more than three years.

Cronin's automotive research focuses on vehicle crashworthiness and occupant safety. Recent projects include collaborations on occupant modeling with an assembler consortium including Chrysler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai and Nissan, as well as work with 3M in automotive adhesives.

Two Waterloo Engineering research projects have received over $212,000 in funding from Carbon Management Canada. John Wen and Robert Varin, both of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, will use the money to characterize and evaluate the on-site adsorption and carbonation of flue gas CO2 in ball-milling activated mine waste. The purpose of their project is to modify the microstructures of mine waste and limestone for minimizing energy consumption and increasing the capacity of CO2 sequestration.

Bryan Tolson, a civil and environmental engineering professor, co-op student Ayman Khedr and doctoral candidate Masoud Asadzadeh recently came in second out of 14 teams in a Water Distribution Network design optimization challenge at the WDSA conference in Adelaide, Australia. The design problem they tackled involved minimizing design costs, greenhouse gas emissions and a measure of overall water age. The team members evaluated 20,000 solutions on a desktop PC using their multi-objective PA-DDS algorithm to help pick a design.

A paper written by doctoral candidate Sailesh Bharati and electrical and computer engineering professor Weihua Zhuang was honoured with the best paper award at this year's IEEE Globecom Conference held December 3 to 7 in Anaheim, California.The title of the winning paper is “Performance Analysis of Cooperative ADHOC MAC for Vehicular Networks.” [conference details]

Mary Wells was just beginning her career when she heard the news on December 6, 1989 that 14 young women had been gunned down at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.

Waterloo Architecture graduate Alison Brooks, (BES '85 and BArch '88, Architecture), was chosen Architect of the Year in Great Britain in the annual Building Design awards program. Brooks, the principal in Alison Brooks Architects, was selected 'best of the best' and named winner of the Schuco Gold Award for having made 'the most significant contribution to British architecture in the last year." She also won the Housing section of the awards program.

A team made up of Waterloo Engineering and Computer Science students took top honours at a Facebook coding competition, beating out some of America's top schools with their app: a voice-activated Facebook search engine.