Future students

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.”

As more and more advanced features are added to the highly automated vehicles of the near future, it won’t be good enough for their computer brains to know what is going on in the world around them.

They will also have to be aware of what is happening inside their own passenger compartments, especially whether their human drivers are paying attention or not.

To get at the heart of a unique design specialization within the Professional Master of Engineering (MEng) degree program at the University of Waterloo, instructor Oscar Nespoli likes to use chess as an analogy.

There is at least one advantage – and a bit of drawback – to being former rugby players and identical twin brothers on a concrete toboggan team.

Size, strength and symmetry make Russell and Graham Giles ideal pushers to get a 300-pound contraption with five helmeted passengers off to a fast, straight start at annual races.

And the drawback?

Their usefulness at the top of the hill means the Cambridge brothers have never actually got to ride in a toboggan with a concrete sliding surface as it hit speeds of up to 50 km/h on the way down.

As a startup in the operational artificial intelligence (AI) sector, EMAGIN Clean Technologies Inc., is finding a receptive audience for a new system that uses AI for environmental protection as a means to help municipal utilities proactively improve their water and wastewater operations.

Imagine worrying that you’re showing possible symptoms of diabetes, cancer, cardiac disease or Alzheimer’s.

Now imagine that instead of spending a restless night poring over medical websites and waiting anxiously for a doctor’s visit, you could simply pull out a device that took a miniscule droplet of blood and analyzed it in minutes.

If the results came back negative, it would be instant peace of mind.

“What’s the worst possible car you could drive if you lived in Japan?” the University of Waterloo systems design engineering professor would ask.

The answers were predictable, typically involving the word ‘diesel’ and large, gas-guzzling vehicles.