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For many students, a term project can evoke a lot of emotions, such as excitement, worry, and enthusiasm; but for one class it provided an opportunity to reconnect with their own cultures. Last month, more than 80 students taking SYDE 361 staged a memorable concert featuring electronic instruments that they designed and built.

Waterloo Engineering is the only Canadian school to land a prestigious Amazon Alexa Fellowship program (others include CMU, MIT, Cambridge, etc.).  The program will be coordinated by Professors Alex Wong, Igor Ivkovic, and Shelley Wang in Systems Design Engineering, as Amazon Alexa Ambassadors, with exciting outreach activities to be developed for both SYDE and other engineering students, and with an Alexa innovation lab having co-op opportunities.

WATERLOO — Potholes and deteriorating roadways are the bane of motorists and a big task for municipalities to manage.

An artificial intelligence software system developed by University of Waterloo researchers can simplify road maintenance to flag defects early, saving taxpayers money and drivers headaches.

"It would make everybody's lives a lot better," said John Zelek, an engineering professor at Waterloo.

Local researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a new artificial intelligence system to detect problems with roads.

Currently it can take up to 24 people to go through about 13,000 images a day looking for potholes. But the new research suggests computers can do majority of the work faster, and with more accuracy.

All the computer needs is images of the roads that can be taken using something as simple as a smart phone, and then their algorithm will do all the work.

Devinder Kumar, and Ph.D. student in Systems Design Engineering under the supervision of Alexander Wong, Canada Research Chair in the field of artificial intelligence, has found a better way to identify atomic structures, an essential step in improving materials selection in the aviation, construction and automotive industries. The findings of the open-access study, published in the journal Nature Communications, could result in greater confidence when determining the integrity of metals.

Alexander Wong, Canada Research Chair in the field of artificial intelligence, Chao Jin, research professor in Systems Design, and Jason Deglint, PhD student in Systems Design, along with research collaborators Prof. Monica Emelko and research associate Maria Mesquita in Civil and Environmental Engineering has developed new artificial intelligence (AI) technology could make monitoring at water treatment plants cheaper and easier and help safeguard public health.  This study has been published in Nature Scientific Reports, and mentioned in a number of media outlets.

$1.65 million will support launch of new biomedical technology graduate program.

By Annemarie Vander Veen

Office of Research

Health technology is a growing industry and research priority in Canada. From pacemakers to implants to prosthetic limbs, we’re surrounded by medical innovations that improve our lives.

A new discovery for a biomedical microscopy that can image into tissues to visualize absorbing structures is pioneered by a Systems Design Engineering professor.  Dr. Parsin Haji Reza and his colleagues recently reported their work in Optica. By taking advantage of photoacoustic initial pressures, a functional all-optical non-contact optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy is reported at depths beyond the optical transport mean-free-path of the excitation wavelength. The proposed method is capable of providing optical resolution images to depths of 2.5mm.

"There are many unsolved problems in robotics, and many opportunities for collaborations between like-minded researchers in Ontario and China," says Dr. John McPhee, Professor and Canada Research Chair in System Dynamics at the University of Waterloo, and one of the workshop presenters. [Read more]