Future students

Ted Livingston saw the future on a smartphone while he was a Waterloo Engineering student doing a string of co-op work terms at BlackBerry.

Now, more than a decade later, he is determined to both shape that future and make it pay as founder and CEO of Kik Interactive, a mobile chat platform that achieved unicorn startup status - one of six unicorns with roots at Waterloo Engineering - with a US $1-billion valuation in 2015.

With a degree in systems design engineering in his back pocket, Sisun Lee was more than happy pursuing a career as a product manager at Tesla in sunny California.

But when an unlikely side project born of personal experience picked up steam, the 2014 Waterloo systems design engineering graduate took a deep breath and switched gears from electric cars to hangover prevention.

Carl Haas, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, has always thought it’s a terrible shame when workers in skilled construction trades, including many of his own friends and relatives, have their careers cut short by wear-and-tear injuries.

Becoming a founder of a unicorn company is a dream that many entrepreneurs hope to achieve.

Alexander Wong and Mohammad Javad Shafiee weren’t sure it would work when they took a page from nature and applied it to making artificial intelligence (AI) more efficient.

Prospective students who have a hard time choosing between Waterloo’s civil engineering and architecture programs will now have another option beginning next year:  architectural engineering.

The new Waterloo Engineering offering, which combines architectural design with building engineering, will launch in September 2018.

Developed to cover the whole gamut of building design, construction, assessment and refurbishment, the recently approved program will provide students with the technical knowledge and skills to design energy and structurally efficient buildings.

But as a researcher who has objectively examined the likely outcomes in such situations using computer modeling, he doesn’t recommend it.

In October, WATonomous, the autonomous car student design team drove a gleaming white Chevrolet Bolt into the bay at Waterloo Engineering’s Sedra Student Design Centre. By 2018, the car will be driving itself out.

Solar panels or geothermal heating? Back-up generator or battery pack? More insulation in the attic or higher-efficiency appliances in the kitchen? For homeowners who want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, protect themselves from energy outages and get the most bang for their buck, sifting through seemingly endless retrofit options can be dizzying.

When Luisa San Martin heard about Blueprint on a co-op term at Google in Seattle, she knew the student team was the ideal fit for Waterloo. Started at UC Berkeley in 2012, Blueprint partners with not-for-profit organizations to create technology such as websites, mobile applications and analysis tools — all free of charge.

“Some of my fellow interns at Google were members of the team in California,” says San Martin, a software engineering student.  “When I found out more about it, I thought it was a really cool idea and one that I wanted to bring to Waterloo.”