Research

A fault called partial partitioning has been identified as the culprit of catastrophic computer system failures. The good news is that researchers have not only identified it; they have figured out how to fix it.

Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo identified the fault, which can cause data loss, system crashes, or data corruption in many computer systems.

A University of Waterloo partnership with the City of Kitchener to further develop the Health Sciences Campus in downtown Kitchener’s Innovation District is moving ahead. 

The tool, which combines supervised machine learning with digital signal processing (ML-DSP), could for the first time make it possible to definitively answer questions such as how many different species exist on Earth and in the oceans. How are existing, newly-discovered, and extinct species related to each other? What are the bacterial origins of human mitochondrial DNA?  Do the DNA of a parasite and its host have a similar genomic signature? 

Waterloo Science Professor 

“The future of our multi-billion-dollar ski industry depends on our climate choices. To preserve it and the thousands of jobs it provides requires us to achieve a low carbon transition,” says Daniel Scott, executive director of Waterloo’s Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change (IC3). “If we do not achieve the Paris Agreement, in the latter half of the century, only high-elevation areas of the Vermont and New Hampshire and select ski areas in Québec will be able to maintain a 100-day season and open regularly over the Christmas-New Year holiday”. 

Pfizer and Moderna announced in recent days that they have vaccine candidates that are over 90 per cent effective in preventing the COVID-19 virus.

Nearly every Canadian has found themselves in a situation where they must get behind the wheel of a car during terrible weather conditions. It could be a rushed trip to the airport, a commute to work, or an early morning hockey practice. It can be scary. How quickly and effectively roads get cleared makes a big difference for our sanity and economy — it also saves lives. 

Professor Mark Servos and his team have been working since early in the pandemic to develop and validate methods to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus in municipal wastewater. They have received financial support to run wastewater surveillance and measure COVID-19 and its variants in municipal wastewater and are providing rapid turnaround for more than ten locations across Ontario.

Alan Plumtree, who helped put the University of Waterloo on the map as an inventor of a pump that provides clean drinking water to developing countries, died suddenly on November 5.

Plumtree, a Waterloo mechanical engineering professor, and Alfred Rudin, a Waterloo chemistry professor, created the hand-operated pump in the late 1970s after being approached by the International Development Research Centre.