News

As we enter the digital age and work to harness the potential of quantum computing, there is an increase in risk of new forms of cyber-attacks. To prepare for these attacks, The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) called on cryptographers to create new algorithms to protect government and industry communications from attacks by quantum computing.

Technology is constantly evolving and as a direct result, the workforce is rapidly changing. To adapt to modern business expectations and realities, Esteban Veintimilla (BMath ‘18) founded 1Mentor to help students prepare for entry into their careers. 1Mentor is an AI-Powered platform that enables high levels of education and navigates students through the rapidly changing job market, and has recently received recognition as a top 100 tech company to watch for in 2022.

In Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields traditionally dominated by men, Gioia De Cari looks to provide an insightful look at the challenges many women like herself face through her play Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp Through MIT’s Male Math Maze.

Boston Congress of Public Health’s 40 Under 40 Public Health Catalyst award recognizes 40 individuals as representatives of future leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists, authors, directors and more roles who inspire and catalyze an equitable world. 

This past summer the Faculty of Mathematics was excited to welcome Stephanie Whitney as Director of Research and Innovation Partnerships. She will help raise research profiles, initiate and develop industry and government relationships and secure funding to support student entrepreneurship. Stephanie has a PhD in Social and Ecological Sustainability (2018), Masters in Environment and Business (2013) and a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Environmental Engineering with an option in Management Science (2004). 

At the Cheriton School of Computer Science, researchers are using unsupervised machine learning to determine taxonomic relationships between organisms. 

Lila Kari, a professor of computer science, along with her PhD students Pablo Millán Arias and Fatemeh Alipour and her colleague Professor Kathleen Hill at Western University’s Department of Biology pioneered this new method, titled Deep Learning for Unsupervised Clustering of DNA Sequences, or DeLUCS for short. 

Applications are open to participate in the Zero Experience programs focused on innovation and entrepreneurship for students of all backgrounds and levels of entrepreneurial experience. 

SkyWatch is a company that gives relief agencies access to its satellite image datasets to aid in surveying the damage and be able to efficiently coordinate a response and was founded by Roland Sing (BMath '85), James Slifierz, and Dexter Jagula in 2014 at a hackathon. SkyWatch has provided support during many disasters, including Hurricane Dorian and the collapse of the Brumadinho dam. 

The effects of climate change are becoming more and more apparent, increasingly in the unpredictability of the weather, thus raising the stakes for weather forecasters. A major concern involves the scale that the weather models run, representing wind, temperature, and other quantities on a grid of points. Professor Michael Waite explains that the spacing of the points and low photo resolution makes it consistently difficult to see the small details.  

Bilal Akhtar graduated from Waterloo’s software engineering program in 2019 and landed a job with Cockroach Labs, a database company based in New York, but Bilal was brought to Toronto. Bilal saw the housing crisis unfold, and even for new graduates there was a struggle, so he decided to join More Neighbours Toronto which is a pro-housing and volunteer organization that advocates for housing development in the GTA.