News

Systems Design is pleased to recognize that Professor Igor Ivkovic was selected by the Engineering Society as the Fall 2017 term’s recipient of the Engineering Society Teaching Excellence Award.

The award recognizes an instructor (professors, lecturers, or laboratory instructors) for their contributions to ensuring academic success for their students. More specifically, the award recognizes an instructor who has:

A team of Systems Design Engineering professors Alexander Wong and Chao Jin, along with PhD student Jason Deglint, took home the grand prize at AquaHacking 2017 Challenge with their imaging-driven AI solution for identifying cyanobacteria at a fraction of the costs compared to the current procedure which is manual, time-consuming, and costly.[Read more]

Systems Design Engineering professor Ning Jiang and alumni Farnoud Kazemzadeh, currently CEO of Elucid Labs, spoke about the impact of Waterloo's research prowess on artificial intelligence and its application within the healthcare realm at the recent  'When Waterloo Meets AI' event.[Where UWaterloo Meets AI - YouTube]

We are pleased to recognize Margaret Cheryl Brewster and Gwyneth Claire Foster as the winning debating team in this term's final in a very-close debate against a team from Nanotechnology. 

Congratulations to Margaret and Gwyneth, who will be joining the Spring term debate winners at the Ontario Engineering Competition in 2018.

One University of Waterloo (UW) PhD candidate has developed an AI program he says shines a light into that black box—the "white box" method—revealing the inner workings of the AI and allowing us to better understand what the computer is learning, how it is analyzing data, and why decisions are made. 

Andre Bertram (Systems Design Engineering) and Frank Nguyen (Computer Engineering) are the co-founders of HelpWear. They are developing wearable products, like the HeartWatch, a 24/7 wearable heart monitoring system that will contact EMS in the event of a heart attack.

Recently, Andre and Frank were showcased on the TV show “Dragon’s Den. They were so impressive that every Dragon invested.

Professor Chris Eliasmith, Director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and a faculty member in Systems Design Engineering, was featured in The Record for his work in building the world's biggest functional model of a human brain.  Article at TheRecord.

Devinder Kumar, a Ph.D. student and Prof. Alexander Wong, an Associate Professor of Systems Design Engineering, was featured in an article by Canadian Underwriter about software that makes it easier to adopt and trust AI.