Events

Join Juanie Pudluk, Director of Infrastucture at Nunavut Housing Corporation, to explore the challenges of building in Nunavut. What are the solutions or strategies that we can use to alleviate the housing crisis? We will discuss some of the challenges and strategies that we have started and share that with the students.

Join Frank Cairo, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Caivan, and Co-Founder of the FCI, to explore the intersection of economy, environment and social realms and the lack of comprehensive, interdisciplinary methods in land use planning. Topics covered:​

• Generative and Parametric Design Tools;​
• Harnessing quantitative methods and optimization in the planning of built environment;​
• The need for robust economic feasibility modelling in municipal decision making;​
  Advanced manufacturing as a productivity solution for the construction sector.

Join Tai Huynh, Editor-in-Chief at The Local, to unpack how cities can be health promoting but they can also make us unwell. How they do this often isn’t very visible and goes beyond plainly obvious things like walkability or road safety. Using Toronto as a case study and drawing on his work at The Local, Huynh will discuss the social determinants of health within the context of a dense urban setting.

Over the span of two weeks, University of Waterloo students will collaborate in multidisciplinary teams to develop innovative solutions for urban challenges. These challenges address pressing issues that cities are facing. Our innovation challenges provide a dynamic, low-risk environment for students to explore creative ideas, with a strong emphasis on applying learning and research to real-world city contexts. Through industry collaborations, students gain rapid insights and feedback, learning how to transform ideas into impactful solutions that can drive positive change in urban development.

Join Sandy Little, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the City of Waterloo, to explore linkages between housing, health (with a focus on planetary health specific to climate change), and humanity highlighting homelessness and the importance of connecting and collaborating with municipal divisions, other levels of government, and community strategic partners in this work.

Join us for the Velocity Future Cities Innovation Challenge Final Awards and Presentations!

​​Come celebrate the top eight teams who have made it this far as they take the stage to deliver their polished three-minute pitches to a live audience and judges. There is $20,000 in cash prizes up for grabs!

• ​Top Three Solutions: $5,000 each
• ​People's Choice Award: $2,500
• ​Bonus Prizes: $2,500

Join us for the i-Capstone Symposium on March 26, 2025, at the E7 Event Space (Second Floor Atrium), University of Waterloo. This annual event showcases the innovative work of fourth-year students from diverse disciplines as they tackle real-world urban challenges in collaboration with industry and community partners.

Angel Hsu
Machine learning, generative AI, including Large Language Models (LLMs) hold immensepotential in addressing critical data and information gaps within city climate policy. Thesetechnologies enable cities to estimate greenhouse gas emission sources, identify environmentalhotspots, evaluate policy performance trends, and comprehend the diverse impacts of climatechange. This presentation will showcase several case studies that illustrate how AI-drivenapproaches can innovate data collection, analysis, and policy formulation in the context of urbanclimate management, including evaluating net-zero climate policy and strategy with LLMs andtopic modeling, distributional climate and environmental impacts within urban areas, theintegration of satellite remote sensing for participatory heat-stress mapping, among otherexamples. It will also discuss some of the challenges and pitfalls of applying AI to urban climatepolicy and management, such as the "black box" AI problem and biases of underlying trainingdata.