Technological Futures

The Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA) received a $5 million dollar donation from the Balsillie Family Fund to establish the Technology Governance Initiative (TGI) at the School.

As part of the Technology Governance Initiative, the Balsillie Scholars Program will invite leading international technology governance scholars and practitioners to the School for periods ranging from three months to one year, fostering mentorship, research, and collaboration.

Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers.

Founded in 1882, the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), which comprises of the Academy of Arts and Humanities, Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Science, recognizes excellence, advises the government and promotes a culture of knowledge and innovation with other national academies around the world.  

Expanding upon its long legacy of excellence, the Department of Management Sciences at Waterloo Engineering has undergone an official name change to better encapsulate the unit’s distinctive, interdisciplinary approach to education within the engineering field.

The introduction of the department’s new name – Management Science and Engineering (MSE) – follows more than a year of discussions, meetings and town halls with students, faculty, staff, alumni and senior engineering faculty leadership.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) is a non-profit corporation that invests in research infrastructure at Canadian universities, colleges, research hospitals and non-profit research institutions. Since 1997, the CFI has been supporting Canadian researchers each year to carry out world-class research through grants and government funding.  

Dr. Lai-Tze Fan wants to make a more equitable AI. Critical approaches to advancing artificial intelligence are urgent, she says. “We tend to want AI to do more and more tasks for us and not be involved ourselves. But if that tendency continues, critical thinking in the process of generation is going to collapse in on itself and we won't have a responsible role in the technology anymore. And that could make AI a dehumanizing tool.”

An engineering professor from the University of Waterloo was awarded $1.2 million in federal funding to protect Canada’s critical energy infrastructure and energy sector supply chains from cyber threats.

Four and a half years ago, the VitalOne was an ambitious idea. Today, the desktop computer-sized blood diagnostics device can run comprehensive tests on comparatively small blood samples — in 20 minutes.

Made by Vital Bio, a company founded at Velocity, the VitalOne was unveiled to the public and scientific community at a conference held by the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) last month, where Vital Bio also won the Disruptive Technology Award.

From automating a medical imaging device to developing a health-care platform to reduce anxiety, the Velocity health stream is creating the next generation of innovators working to transform their research into real-world technological solutions.

Artificial intelligence has made protein design lightning fast, creating digital blueprints for cures to some of the most life-limiting ailments. While this means we now have thousands of new potential therapeutics, for these cures to be realized the designs need to be synthesized and validated in a laboratory environment, which can take a considerable amount of time.