News

Engineers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a new way to program robots to help people with dementia locate medicine, glasses, phones and other objects they need but have lost.

Dr. Ali Ayub, a post-doctoral fellow in electrical and computer engineering, and three colleagues believed a companion robot with an episodic memory of its own could be a game-changer for these people and their caregivers. Using artificial intelligence, Ayub and the research team have successfully created a new kind of artificial memory that can help find lost items.

Naomie Seh Abomo, a fourth-year civil engineering student, has been awarded Canada’s 3M National Student Fellowship Award.

She is one of just 10 students from across the country to receive this prestigious national fellowship in recognition of her outstanding leadership and dedication to her community.

Michael Litt (BASc ’11, systems deisgn engineering) and Devon Galloway (BASc ’10, systems design engineering) co-founded Vidyard, a Kitchener-based video production company, in 2011. 

Vidyard now has about 300 employees, international hubs in the United States and UK, more than 12 million users and is selling its products and services to about 160,000 companies. To fuel this growth, Vidyard employs talented graduates and co-op students from the University of Waterloo.

Dr. Jennifer Howcroft and Dr. Kate Mercer believe that seeing the world through the eyes of students and empathizing with them is an essential pedagogical technique.

At a recent University of Waterloo teaching and learning conference, Howcroft and Mercer, both faculty members in the Department of Systems Design Engineering, hosted a session on “empathy as the foundation for a caring classroom,” which demonstrated practical techniques they use in their teaching.

Waterloo Engineering doctoral student Kelly Zheng has a lot on her plate.

But with help from a PhD fellowship to encourage budding entrepreneurs, she is working towards both her doctorate and a graduate business degree, and building a startup company that involves the use of artificial intelligence to measure carbon-sequestering seaweed in the ocean.

“The knowledge that my supervisors were in my corner was a big reason that I felt comfortable to dream big,” Zheng said.

In a world hungry for clean energy, engineers have created a new material that converts the simple mechanical vibrations all around us into electricity to power sensors in everything from pacemakers to spacecraft.

The first of its kind and the product of a decade of work by researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto, the novel generating system is compact, reliable, low-cost and very, very green.

A group of Waterloo Engineering students got some industry assistance with their Capstone Design Project from a team at Sleeman Breweries.

Waterloo Engineering alumnus Melanie Pastorius (BASc, chemical engineering), a quality assurance manager at Sleeman, and her colleague Jonathan Crawshaw, a brewing technical specialist, helped the students land an idea for a project that studied carbon capture from the brewing process.

A team from Waterloo Engineering has won an international competition aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in the mapping of sea ice.

The team included professors, researchers and graduate students in a remote sensing research group that is a subgroup of the larger Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab within the Department of Systems Design Engineering.

A professor at Waterloo Engineering is part of an ambitious, $24-million research project that received the green light from the federal government this week.

Dr. Yimin Wu, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, is a co-applicant on CANSTOREnergy: Seasonal storage of renewable energy, a six-year initiative involving dozens of participants.

Two professors at the University of Waterloo are members of a team that has been chosen to represent Canada at the next Venice Biennale showcase of architecture.

Adrian Blackwell and David Fortin, both professors at the Waterloo School of Architecture, belong to Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA), which will launch Not for Sale!, an architectural activist campaign, at the Canada Pavilion in Giardini, Italy.