News

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.

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]

The design of Team Inove, made up of Amer Abu-Khajil and Jacqueline Doucet, both third-year civil engineering students, and Nader Alkadri and Josh Layton, both fourth-year urban planning students, will be redesigning the main entrance to the Waterloo campus. Team Inove beat out two other teams in the i3 Challenge, the student competition to design an element of the campus. The deciding factor for Team Inove was the elegance and simplicity of its design, said i3 Challenge committee chair Jeff Casello, a professor in the faculties of engineering and environment.

Waterloo systems design engineering students will showcase product designs offering innovative solutions to problems that can occur in sports activities. On July 22 12 student groups in a third-year systems design engineering course will present their work from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in room 1301 of the Davis Centre. The design prototypes address a variety problems including improving synchronization for dragon boating and reducing skidding in bicycle racing. [news release]

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]

As a teenager Amanda LeDuc wasn’t sure what her future held, but she knew one thing: she wanted to help people. Now a fourth-year Waterloo management engineering student LeDuc is involved in the engineering society and has held a wide variety of engineering roles, including three terms as a student director on the Women in Engineering Committee. Her current focus is on Go ENG Girl, a WIE event to be held October 1, 2011, at 11 universities across Ontario. Registration for Go ENG Girl begins August 5. 

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.

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.

2G Robotics, founded by mechanical and mechatronics master’s student Jason Gillham, is helping document the HMS Investigator, a British ship sent out 150 years ago to search for John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition. This summer, divers are recording and assessing the wreck resting near the shore of Aulavik National Park in Northwest Territoires. Equipment to be used includes a robotic underwater laser scanner developed by 2G Robotics, a University of Waterloo spinoff company.