UWRA 2025 Spring luncheon and speaker
SOLD OUT
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Welcome: 11.00 a.m.
Buffet lunch: 11:30 a.m.
Our host is Village at University Gates,
250 Laurelwood Drive, Waterloo,
Ruby Room (10th floor, near the elevator); parking is free on site
The lunch will be Buffet Style, consisting of:
- Soup of the Day
- Ruby Salad
- Assorted Sandwiches
- Fries
- Squares & Dessert Platter
- Non-alcoholic drinks.
- Please note that alcoholic beverages are available for an extra cost.
- Please indicate dietary restriction on your registration submission.
The welcome table opens at 11.00 a.m.; please arrive in time to be seated for lunch at 11.30 a.m.
There is free parking at the facility, but if the parking lot becomes full, there is also free parking across the road at the YMCA/Harper Library, where parking is available in the first lot on the left, in the Conestoga College spaces.
The cost for this event is $10.00 per person (each) for Members, and one guest.
Please note that the Ruby Room has a capacity of 50 people.
This event is organized by the UWRA Social Committee: Directors James Ashworth and Sue Fraser.
Guest Speaker: Shabnam Ivković
Meet the future - a front seat to an evolving technology landscape.
The role of technology at work & home is broad and varied – spanning from using Microsoft products for writing notes, building basic databases, and creating presentations, to using platforms like Webex and Zoom for virtual collaboration, meeting up, and keeping bookclubs going through the pandemic. For years now, Siri and Alexa have kept us company in our homes. For those of us who are gamers (or know gamers), we’ve seen futuristic headsets that make digital worlds come alive.
In the last couple of years, the world has been taken by storm by generative AI, or as you might have heard of it, ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini, and so on. Augmented or Virtual Reality (AR/VR) has been growing at a slower pace via applications like Google’s VR Tours, 19 Crimes Wines and Ikea’s Place app. Generative AI, standard AI, AR/VR, are called exponential technologies because they’re either coming in very quickly or are having unprecedented impact – and our lives aren’t immune to any of it.
About the speaker - Shabnam (Shay) Ivković spends her days at the University of Waterloo. But her first love and ongoing love affair is with technology. Her Engineering capstone project more than a couple of decades ago was on Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks. Since then, her professional journey has been a story of falling forward into opportunities where technology adoption has always been part of the picture.
This event is SOLD OUT.