News

A professor at Waterloo Engineering has been recognized by a leading industry association as one of the 20 most influential academics in smart manufacturing.

Mihaela Vlasea, associate research director of the Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing (MSAM) Lab, is one of just three women and two academics from Canada who made the list, which was announced today by the SME.

From self-driving cars to intelligent voice assistants to smart factories, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every sector of the economy and the very fabric of society in fundamental ways. The University of Waterloo, a long-time leader in innovation, has been at the forefront of this transformation for decades, but especially so since the 2018 launch of the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute – Waterloo.AI.

Four high-risk, high-reward research projects led by Waterloo Engineering professors were awarded a total of $1 million in federal funding this week.

Each of the projects is eligible for up to $250,000 over two years under the New Frontiers in Research Fund 2020 Exploration program, which brings researchers from different disciplines together to pursue breakthrough ideas.

Waterloo Engineering is offering free tutoring to high school students across Ontario to help them succeed with remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new program, known as Hive Mind, is aimed at Grade 10, 11 and 12 students who are struggling in advanced functions, calculus, chemistry and physics — all key subjects required to pursue post-secondary engineering programs. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by researchers at Waterloo Engineering is capable of assessing the severity of COVID-19 cases with a promising degree of accuracy.

The study, part of the COVID-Net open-source initiative launched more than a year ago, involved researchers from Waterloo and spin-off startup company DarwinAI, as well as radiologists at the Stony Brook School of Medicine and the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

Researchers at Waterloo Engineering and in Japan have developed a mathematical method to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles and other autonomous systems.

The new tool, developed as part of a five-year collaboration, gives engineers a systematic way to determine the safety margin made necessary by uncertainties in sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.

In the case of autonomous vehicles, for instance, extra braking distance may be required to guarantee safety because systems can perceive objects to be further away than they actually are.

A second-year biomedical engineering student at Waterloo has won a national scholarship for women based on their leadership, volunteerism and community involvement.

Sophie Stupalo is one of five winners country-wide of $5,000 awards from the Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation, which promotes the profession as a career choice for young women.

A professor at Waterloo Engineering was recently honoured by the National Academy of Sciences of America for research involving a gel-like robot, inspired by sea slugs and snails, that is steerable by light.

Hamed Shahsavan, who joined Waterloo as a professor of chemical engineering last year, was lead author of a paper chosen as a finalist for a Cozzarelli Prize recognizing the top work published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2020.

An alumnus of the School of Architecture at Waterloo was recently announced as the winner of a prestigious award through the Canada Council for the Arts.

Samantha Eby (BAS ’14), who works as an architectural designer at Batay-Csorba Architects in Toronto, is the recipient of the 2020 Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners.