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A team including four Waterloo students came in first place in the Challenge stream of this year’s Challenge4ClimateAction competition.

The winning team, Team Golden Marauders, consisted of Waterloo Double Degree students Miraal Kabir, Alex Shehdula, Daria Margarit, and Martin Turuta. The team also included Hanna Rao from McMaster University and Kiana Dhindsa from Wilfrid Laurier University.

“Imagine being out on a lake on a windy day and you’re getting pushed around by waves,” says Marek Stastna, an oceanographer and professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics. “What you may not realize is that in the interior of the ocean, there are waves one hundred times that size. My passion is to create mathematical models of that type of movement.”

When Chris Salahub learned he could explore his passion for data in a dedicated math faculty at Waterloo, the high schooler had an easy decision to make. Just two years after graduation, when he was on the verge of finishing a master’s degree in Switzerland, he decided to return for a second degree. “About halfway through my master’s, I realized I wanted to do a PhD,” he remembered. “It just made sense to go back to Waterloo because I had discovered such a supportive community there.”

“Gaining broad technical skills in artificial intelligence and data science isn’t actually that challenging,” recognized Jaskirat Bhatia. “You can find countless tutorials on Youtube that will teach you the basics. But they can’t tell you which tools to apply to which problems. They can’t guide your learning in any way.” That’s where the Master of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (MDSAI) comes in.