Nicholas Vadivelu, a Computer Science and Statistics double major and Spencer Whitehead a Pure Mathematics major are the recipients of the prestigious Jessie W.H.
Wherever Adina Goldberg goes, she leaves a trail of newly-created community events, academic initiatives and connection opportunities behind her. The Pure Mathematics PhD student and self-described “huge extrovert” carries the mantra: “Make things happen if they don’t exist – just build it yourself.”
Amrita Punnavajhala, recipient of the 2021 Mehta-Jenner Climate Change Mitigation Graduate scholarship, plans to research coupled social climate models – math models that describe two-way relationships between human behaviour and climate change trajectories.
Starting Friday, April 30th at noon, 127 Waterloo undergraduate students found themselves knee-deep in data for 48 hours at the University of Waterloo’s 2021 American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest.
Congratulations to Professors Bin Ma and Sue Ann Campbell on their appointments as University Research Chairs at the University of Waterloo. Both researchers are highly distinguished and have made significant, valuable contributions in their respective fields.
When Sacha Tihanyi was halfway through an undergraduate economics degree at Laurentian University, he recognized a budding passion for mathematics. “I had many broad interests in school, but something flipped for me during that program, and I knew I needed to do a whole different degree focused on math,” he remembered. “I chose Waterloo because it had a reputation as the best mathematics school in Canada.”
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.”
Each year, the University of Waterloo recognizes employees by celebrating their milestones of distinguished service to the University of Waterloo community.
Staff and faculty celebrating 5 to 50 years of service were honoured across a series of virtual events to recognize their contributions and tireless work that have impacted the success of the university. Join in the celebration and view messages of congratulations on the celebration board.