On November 4th, Drs. Lai-Tze Fan and Jon Saklofske led a game jam workshop where participants explored how game environments and tools can encourage players and developers to pursue broader social, cultural, and interpersonal understandings.
The University of Waterloo has announced the following 15 funded postdoctoral positions, including five specific positions for Black and Indigenous scholars.
Applications are open now to scholars from any discipline and are due December 1st. Applicants may choose from one of the three programs listed below.
The GI Game Jam ran from September 29th to October 2nd, led by Jam co-captains, PhD students Joseph Tu (Systems Design Engineering) and Alexander Glover (Management Sciences). The Jam saw the development of 17 games.
GI alumna, and current Research Communications Officer, Dr. Emma Vossen was recently interviewed by Toxic Avenger Magazine about her research on games culture and online harassment.
Dr. Shana Macdonald (Communication Arts) was interviewed on July 11th about the massive Canada-wide Rogers outage that saw many Canadians without access to the internet, phone service, or even ATMs.
On June 29th, Member of Parliament Bill Blair presented Dean of Health Dr. Lili Liu and her team with $2.1 million dollars of funding over three years to support their project to enhance search and rescue capabilities for when people with dementia go missing.
The project titled “Managing Risks of Going Missing among Persons Living with Dementia by Building Capacities of SAR Personnel, First Responders and Communities” will create dementia-friendly resources across six provinces and in collaboration with two indigenous communities, the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba and the Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory in Quebec.
The Velocity Concept Funding Grant Finals took place on July 14th, both virtually and in person at the Student Life Center. Out of 49 total applicants, 9 teams of students compete for four $5,000 funding awards for their innovative projects. While the competition finals are normally eight teams, this year the judges decided nine was necessary due to the high quality of the competitors.
On July 5th, GI membersDr. John Muñoz (J&F Alliance), Dr. Lili Liu (Dean of Faculty of Health), and Dr. Michael Barnett Cowan (Kinesiology and Health Sciences) came together to discuss the overlap between using games in areas of health.
Games Institute faculty member Ben Thompson (School of Optometry and Vision Science) was recently named a 2022 University Research Chair. Dr Thompson is the CEO and Scientific Director of the Center for Eye and Vision Research, and his research focuses on human brain plasticity and visual cortex particularly in promoting plasticity to improve outcomes for patients with brain-based visual disorders.
Games Institute PhD student and Research Communications Writer Sid Heeg (Environment) delivered a guest talk to the UW Staff Association about COVID-19 misinformation on May 12th, 2022.
Heeg’s talk Malicious Messaging: How Misinformation Operates Online covered how misinformation forms, how it differs from disinformation and how it appears online using examples from real COVID-19 misinformation that has been spread on social media.
They argued that the “COVID-19 Pandemic has made it clear that we are living in a time of rapid misinformation and distrust in public and government institutions.