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Strategic Initiatives: Transformative Research
- Professor Thomas Coleman was selected as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for his contributions to large-scale, sparse numerical and financial optimization, leadership in mathematics education, and engagement with the industry.
- Professor Kate Larson was honoured with the Canadian Association of Computer Science’s Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award for her research on artificial intelligence and strategic reasoning in self-interested multiagent systems.
- Distinguished Professors Emereti Alan George and Frank Tompa both received the Canadian Association for Computer Science (CACS/AIC) Lifetime Achievement in Computer Science Award.
- Professor Ian Munro renewed his Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Algorithm Design. In this position, Munro was awarded $1.4M over seven years, and will improve data organization by addressing time and space constraints in information systems.
- Professor Luke Postle became a new Tier 2 CRC in Graph Theory. Postle was awarded $500K over five years and will study the structural, topological, and chromatic properties of graphs to develop applications in computer science, communication, and transportation.
- Professor Cam Stewart renewed his Tier 1 CRC in Number Theory for another seven years, and Professor David Landriault renewed his Tier 2 CRC in Risk Theory.
- Distinguished Professor Emeritus Josef Paldus was honoured with the 2015 Neuron Award for Contribution to Science in chemistry.
- The federal government invested $15.5M over five years and Manulife invested $1M to support Waterloo and the the Risk Management, Economic Stability, and Actuarial Science Development in Indonesia (READI) initiative. This project will increase the amount of actuarial talent in Indonesia with support from academic and industry partners.
- Professor Stefan Steiner and his co-authors were awarded the American Society for Quality Statistics Division’s 2014 Lloyd Nelson Award in September 2015 for an article which appeared in the Journal of Quality Technology for having the greatest immediate impact to practitioners.
- Students and professors with Waterloo’s Data Systems Group, Jaemyung Kim, Ken Salem, Khuzaima Daudjee, Ashraf Aboulnaga, and Xin Pan, were awarded best paper at the 2015 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Cloud Computing.
- Professor Lila Kari’s original and continuous contributions and development of the field of DNA computing and molecular programming were recognized with the International Society of Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engingeering’s Rozenberg Tulip Award for DNA Computer Scientist of the Year.
- Professor Eric Katz and his colleagues successfully proved mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota’s 45-year old conjecture on the log concavity of the characteristic polynomial of matroids, presenting their finding at the University of Oregon’s workshop on Positivity in Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry in August 2015.
- Waterloo’s Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC) received the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s (NSERC) Award for Science Promotion by providing mathematics and computer science resources to millions of Canadians since its inception in 1963.
- Graduate student Keegan Keplinger won the Best Poster at the 2015 Applied Mathematics, Modeling, and Computational Science - Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (AMMCS-CAIMS) conference.
- Graduate student Noel Chalmers won Best Student Paper and Best Student Talk at the Conference of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Society of Canada (CCFDSC).
- Professor Ken Davidson organized and presented the inaugural R.G. Douglas lecture series at Texas A&M University.
- Professor Jason Bell was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Algebra. Bell is also currently editor for two separate algebra and computation journals.
- PhD student Stanley Xiao received a NSERC postdoctoral fellowship which he will hold at Oxford starting in fall 2016.
- In 2015, undergraduate Daniel Spivak became the only student in the last ten years from a Canadian university to be named a Putnam Fellow, ranking among the top five candidates.
- Yujie Zhong received the Statistical Society of Canada’s (SSC) Pierre Robillard Award for best PhD thesis in probability or statistics. This award has been received by Waterloo students for six of the past eight years.
- Grace Y. Yi received the SSC’s Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for outstanding quality of methodological innovation and presentation in a paper published in the previous year.
- Researcher Ryan Browne received the International Federation of Classification Societies’ 2015 Chikio Hayashi Award for Young Researchers for showing promise and contributing to the domains of classification, data analysis, and related areas.
- PhD students Mingyu Fang, Jingong Zhang, and Kenneth Zhou were the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Hickman Scholars in the 2015/16 year.
- A team of Waterloo students Simon Li, Arun Sithamparapillai, Sajid Virani and Nancy Yang won first prize in the case competition of the 2016 Actuarial Students National Association (ASNA).
- Professor M. Tamer Özsu received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) John R. Evans Leaders Fund in support of “Scaling the Cluster Computing Infrastructure for Scalable Big Data Management and Analysis.”
- Professor Doug Andrews, from the Faculty of Math, is partnering with the University of Kent, Society of Actuaries, Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, and Canadian Institute of Actuaries to analyze the impact of overvalued assets and lower than expected pensions on the aging population. The research is funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council grant of $200K.
William G. Davis enter houses the offices of the David R. Cherlton School of Computer Science.
Strategic Initiatives: Academic Programming
- New courseware from the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC) won the 2015 Canadian Network for Innovation in Education award for Excellence and Innovation in Integration of Technology in the K-12 Classroom. The courseware supports teachers and grade twelve students in learning about advanced functions and pre-calculus, and calculus and vectors.
- CEMC added four new computer science courses to the suite of online courseware: Python from scratch, language independent programming lessons, web basics, and web programming. This free courseware is intended for beginning programmers, including university students, and can be accessed without registration and with minimal software requirements.
- CEMC’s Problem of the Week expanded to include third and fourth grade students, and reaches roughly 800K people a week through almost 20K unique subscribers.
- CEMC's Master of Mathematics for Teachers (MMT) is now in its sixth year. This program was designed so the teachers attending can reintegrate the course material into their own classrooms. With roughly 200 graduates and 240 currently in the program, an estimated 900K mathematics students could be impacted.
- More than 230K students from more than 75 countries registered for the CEMC’s Contests in 2015/16.
- When visiting other schools, CEMC faculty worked with almost 20K students at more than 300 schools worldwide.
- Waterloo’s Master of Quantitative Finance program tied for 14th among the best financial engineering master’s programs in North America by QuantNet.
- In 2015, Waterloo placed 20th in the world for Mathematics, 24th for Computer Science, and in the Top 100 for Statistics and Operations Research in the annual Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World Subject rankings.Waterloo's Computer Science program ranked 29th in the National Taiwan University rankings, and 19th in the U.S. News World Report rankings.
- Math students Kamaljot Dhaliwal, Rudder Zhang, together with teammates from the Faculties of Arts and Science, became the first Canadian team to win the Global 2016 Chartered Financial Analysis Institute Research Challenge.
Strategic Initiatives: Robust Employer-Employee Relationships
- The Faculty of Mathematics achieved Excellence Canada's bronze certification in the Excellence, Innovation, and Wellness (EIW) standard for organizational performance.