News

Alumni from Canada, the US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Great Britain, Norway, Switzerland and Australia joined together for a virtual celebration of International Women in Mathematics Day on May 12. They attended virtual coffee, multiple panels, a screening of Secrets of the Surface: The Mathematical Vision of Maryam Mirzakhani and connected on social media with the hashtag #IAmGoodAtMath and on the Waterloo Math Digital Community.

Mark Giesbrecht will become the 12th dean of the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics. He will commence his five-year appointment on July 1, 2020.

The distinguished computer scientist has nearly 20 years’ experience at Waterloo and will leverage his abilities as an administrator, teacher, and researcher to lead the Faculty of Mathematics.

Prof. Mark Giesbrecht

A new artificial intelligence tool is being used to help medical researchers at a Toronto-area hospital shave months off the time they need to identify clinical studies available to help physicians treat COVID-19 patients.

When Shanku Niyogi (BMath CS ’94) learned about the Waterloo Student Emergency Support Fund, he knew he had to pitch in.

A result of the collaboration of campus leadership with the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association (WUSA), the Student Emergency Support Fund provides short-term financial help for students facing unexpected expenses as a result of COVID-19.

Researchers have created a new a new system that helps Internet users ensure their online data is secure.

The software-based system, called Mitigator, includes a plugin users can install in their browser that will give them a secure signal when they visit a website verified to process its data in compliance with the site’s privacy policy.  

Recent PhD graduates, Tom Kelly (Combinatorics and Optimization) and Priyank Jaini (Computer Science), have been awarded the Faculty of Mathematics Doctoral Prize. Now in its second year, these prizes are awarded annually to recognize the achievements of top graduating doctoral students in the Faculty of Mathematics.

Canadian provinces such as Ontario and Quebec should wait several more months before lifting social distancing restrictions, according to the findings of a new mathematical model developed by University of Waterloo researchers.

The new model, called Distancing-SEIRD, indicates that continuing social distancing at the current levels in Ontario and Quebec for six months (until mid-September), could save close to 100,000 lives. 

The machine learning-enabled model was recently the subject of a study that is pending peer review. 

Every day we learn about the number of new positive cases, the number of deaths and the number of resolved cases of COVID-19. But is there more information we should be collecting about who the virus is infecting?

In open source software repositories such as GitHub — an online platform for software development where developers store their projects and collaborate with other developers — the quality of a coder’s technical contributions is undoubtedly important. Such communities have long seen themselves as meritocracies where code is king and decisions are based solely on technical excellence.

Jackson Mills saw a problem with student feedback. Originally, he thought that students were falling behind in some classes because of a translation error due to the use of jargon. He and another classmate thought that if they translated lectures into more visual metaphors it would eliminate the use of jargon. Although that’s no longer the problem he’s working on, he’s had the chance to explore what it’s like to be an entrepreneur during his Enterprise Co-op (E Co-op) term.