News

As global COVID-19 lockdowns have us sitting through days of videoconferences, it becomes clear that paying attention online is hard work.

In two new papers, researchers from the University of Waterloo and Microsoft Research explore people’s attentiveness in videoconferences to understand how to make the online meetings more comfortable and effective.

The University of Waterloo’s first-ever virtual Concept $5K competition challenged entrepreneurs to pitch to an online audience instead of a packed auditorium. Confident in the value of their creation, the founders of Reflect rose to the occasion and walked away with $5,000 to invest in their growing business.

Waterloo’s Department of Applied Mathematics PhD candidate James Petrie is among a group of volunteers who have combined their knowledge to develop Covid Watch, an app that uses Bluetooth to detect when users are in proximity to each other and alerts them anonymously if they were in contact with someone later confirmed to have COVID-19. The app uses privacy-preserving measures so that no one, including the government, can track down who exposed whom.

The following was excerpted from an article published on the website of CS-Can/Info-Can, the nation’s professional society dedicated to representing all aspects of computer science and the interests of the discipline to Canadians.

It’s not about building technology; it’s about finding a solution to an existing problem for the research group of Ihab Ilyas, a professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

The leaders of Waterloo’s student-run autonomous vehicle team have run into their fair share of roadblocks, but they’re not stopping now.

From left to right: Ben Zhang, Ray Li, Charles Zhang, Rowan Dempster, and John Phillips

Some jurisdictions in Canada and around the world are using cell phone data to track the spread of COVID-19. How would this work? What are the privacy concerns around using personal data for this purpose?

University of Waterloo Faculty to Mathematics researchers have developed a new method that enables large insurers to reduce the time spent estimating the financial liabilities of their portfolios from days to hours while achieving high accuracy.

A study details the new method which significantly reduces computational time, but still estimates the financial liability of variable annuity portfolios accurately for business purposes.

Congratulations to Professors Shai Ben-David, Penny Haxell and Alexander Schied on their appointments as University Research Chairs. All three researchers have illustrious careers and are well-known in their fields.

University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics students help create a web-based data-gathering platform that has been promoted by Montreal’s public health authority to its citizens in an effort to flatten the curve of COVID-19 in that city.

The University of Waterloo appointed Professor Richard Cook a “University Professor” in recognition of his outstanding research contributions in the field of Biostatistics. Waterloo’s designation of University Professor acknowledges exceptional scholarly achievement and international pre-eminence.