News

SE2024 student Ryan Dancy will present at the Lunary and Planetary Science Conference in Texas next month, based on his project from EE-584 Spacecraft Design and System Engineering, taken while on exchange at EPFL in Switzerland. This project applies the decision-oriented approach to systems architecture to design a mission concept for an explorer probe to Europa.

Europa is a moon of Jupiter that was discovered by Galileo in 1610, and is known to have water and ice. NASA has existing plans to send a probe to Europa, and this project considered a different point in the design space. 

Ryan has also had three co-op internships in the aerospace field. In summer 2022 he worked on AR/VR applications for lunar rovers at the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. He is currently on his second co-op internship at Mission Control in Ottawa, which is on track to be the first company to ever demonstrate deep learning AI software on the moon.

Bilal Akhtar, SE2019, is tackling the GTA housing crisis as part of MNTO (More Neighbours Toronto):

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/software-engineering-grad-tackles-housing-crisis 

https://www.moreneighbours.ca/ 

Waterloo Black, including SE's own Wesley Leung, won first at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) regional competition for East Central North America, competing against 67 teams from Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, University of Toronto, Ohio State, and University of Michigan, along with other universities across Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Congratulations!

WATORACE, including SE's own Kyle Anderson, won 4th place in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) virtual race #3, also capturing the Rising Star Award. The IAC brings together 18 university teams from 11 countries on 4 continents in the world’s first head-to-head, high-speed autonomous race at the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS).

ECE Professor Ladan Tahvildari has been named Chair of the IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering.

SE students Ethan Chen, Samuel Hao, Emily Tao, William Wen, and Yifei Zhang are part of the team on Flatten.ca, which is a website to crowd-source COVID-19 symptom distribution. This data might help researchers and the public to flatten the curve. The team also includes students from UWaterloo CS and other universities.

SE2020 students Jasper Chapman-Black, Céline O'Neil and Sean Purcell won first-place in the Canadian Engineering Competition Programming Challenge. The team developed an algorithm to simulate a drone reconstructing a broken 3D model, determined how to move the pieces back into place and created a visualization for it.

SE2020 students Jasper Chapman-Black, Céline O'Neil and Sean Purcell won first place in the Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC) Programming Competition. The team developed a system to control an hour-by-hour simulation of power generation in Ontario. “We combined a control system and a linear programming solver to pick the optimal combination of power sources to use, minimizing cost and CO₂ emissions," says Purcell.

This weekend in Toronto, a group of Software Engineering students will be running Citizen Hacks, a new hackathon about privacy and socially beneficial technology. The event encourages youth to tackle the challenge of privacy in technology and begin to develop a design orientation that considers technology’s broader social impacts.

Fourth year SE students Spencer Dobrik, David Tsenter, Ryan Wang & Aaron Cotter are winners of the Spring 2019 Baylis Medical award for their health-tech capstone venture, Lukabox. Their aim is to solve medication non-adherence through an IoT pillbox that helps patients stay on top of their medication routines, while giving peace of mind to family members through seamless, real-time monitoring. They are thrilled to receive the Baylis Medical award and are proceeding with an initial round of user testing.