April 19 to 25 is National Volunteer Week, a time to recognize volunteers for all that they do.
It began as a few words on a sticky note while a team of engineering students at the University of Waterloo brainstormed ideas for their fourth-year design project.
Now, little more than six months later, the students have a working prototype of a portable, low-cost ventilator they hope could soon help save lives on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis.
“It’s a total fluke, but our project couldn’t be any more relevant than it is today,” says Connor Simmons, one of four team members from the mechatronics and mechanical engineering programs.
A quick pivot and a string of long days allowed Waterloo Engineering to connect with prospective students even as the coronavirus crisis picked up steam last month.
Instead of welcoming applicants and their families to the usual campus-wide open house during the March break - one of countless events cancelled as strict social distancing measures took effect - staff were able to send out more than 12,000 personalized emails with links to online videos.
University of Waterloo facilities have shifted their production focus to 3D-printed parts for face shields used by health-care workers battling COVID-19.
Since 1957, co-operative education has been a cornerstone of the University of Waterloo’s history.
In our rapidly changing economy, corporate leaders must respond to the opportunities and challenges of the shifting nature of work. Canada and the world need creative minds who can expertly navigate disruption and leverage new technologies to ensure a prosperous economic future.
Executives from the private and public sector explored how to future-proof the Canadian workforce by attracting and retaining top talent at the Waterloo Innovation Summit in Ottawa.
The University of Waterloo's startup incubator Velocity has launched a second venture capital fund targeted specifically at early-stage startups involved in health technology.
The announcement came Thursday evening in Kitchener during Velocity's tri-annual pitch competition.
The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (NSHCC) was established in 1921 as a welfare institution for African Nova Scotian children in need of care. Operating for more than 70 years, the home was a site of institutional abuse. When former residents began to come forward in 1998 to speak about their experiences of harm, they were met with denials and silence by authorities. It would be more than a decade before their voices were properly heard.
In the world of startups, the University of Waterloo’s incubator Velocity is a giant. Velocity has helped launch over 300 companies with a remarkably vast array of business models and technologies that have received more than $1 billion in investment. It supported the creation of some of 2019s fastest growing startups and most recently launched Concept, a campus-focused pre-incubator to further encourage students to learn about scaling their ideas into a business.
Researchers have created a new testing and training tool to inspire solutions to the particularly complex challenges of developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of handling winter weather.
Released today, the free, open-source dataset - dubbed the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions Dataset (CADC) - is a collaboration of research teams at Waterloo Engineering and the University of Toronto that are working to advance AV perception algorithms.