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Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Kate Larson and her international colleagues have published a commentary in Nature about the need for cooperative artificial intelligence — beneficial AI with social understanding.

AI assistants and recommendation algorithms interact with billions of people every day, yet they have little understanding of humans. Professor Larson and her colleagues argue that AI needs social understanding and cooperative intelligence to integrate beneficially into society.

Eliciting curiosity — the intrinsic desire to explore and to find new information — enhances learning, promotes information-seeking and improves memory. Understanding how to elicit and maintain curiosity in students could help us design educational robots that stimulate interest, engagement and a quest for knowledge.

“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.”

Lucy Gao has hardly stopped to take a breath since she accepted a role as an assistant professor of statistics at the Faculty of Mathematics. She graduated with a doctorate in biostatistics from the University of Washington in June 2020 and joined the Faculty a month later. “There are a million things I’m doing for the first time, from working with students in an advisory role to applying for grants,” she shared. 

“I started out as a student in mathematics,” said Professor Yuying Li. “It was a huge, scary move to come to Waterloo for computer science. Thankfully, it has worked out.” 

Faculty of Mathematics Professor William Slofstra credits the University of Waterloo’s collaborative environment for him receiving a 2021 Sloan Research Fellowship. The pure mathematician is keen to use the monetary prize that comes with the fellowship to enhance the supportive atmosphere he has benefited from at Waterloo.

Professor Mei Nagappan spends most of his time following digital footprints to see where they lead. “The goal of our research is to make the life of a software engineer slightly easier tomorrow than it is today,” he explained.

AI models can optimize health-care delivery to help offset the backlog of elective surgeries caused by COVID-19. 

In a new study led by University of Waterloo student Natasha Rozario, machine learning was used to create customized models to optimize the efficiency of operating room (OR) booking times. The model enables a 40 per cent increase in the frequency of ORs running on time.

Researchers have found a way to use comic strips to teach coding to novice learners.

Coding strips utilize comics to present programming concepts in a more accessible way. They chose comics because it is a medium well-known for its ability to explain complicated concepts and processes effectively through visual storytelling.

A fault called partial partitioning has been identified as the culprit of catastrophic computer system failures. The good news is that researchers have not only identified it; they have figured out how to fix it.

Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo identified the fault, which can cause data loss, system crashes, or data corruption in many computer systems.