2022 events

Office Hour with Craig McQueen (BASc ’93), VP at Softchoice, on “Take charge of your career in tech”

Waterloo Engineering students and alumni are invited to participate in an exclusive virtual Office Hour with Waterloo Engineering alumni Craig McQueen (BASc 1993, Systems Design Engineering), vice president of digital acceleration at Softchoice, as he shares tips and advice on taking charge of your career in tech.

Office hour with Roy Unny (BASc ’93, MASc ’96), Technical Director on Transportation Lessons from Australia

A systems design engineer’s view of rail as a complex socio-technical system: Lessons from Australia

Waterloo students and alumni are invited to participate in an exclusive in-person Office Hour with Waterloo Engineering alumni Roy Unny (BASc ’93 MASc ’96, Systems Design Engineering), a leader in transport and infrastructure based in Melbourne, Australia.  

Human Factors in Esports: Investigating performance measures, coaching practice, and stress training (PhD Defence)

Presented by: Bader Sabtan 

This thesis examined a constant problem in Esports in which players do not perform to their expected potential when under stress (also known as choking). The Esports scene is growing exponentially, with teams valued at hundreds of millions of US dollars and average salaries for professional Esports players around $62,500 annually. League of Legends (LOL) is the most popular, viewed game in Esports, peaking at 4.1 million concurrent viewers and 664,100,000 hours watched in 2021.

The effect of stress exposure training on player performance in League of Legends games

Presented by: Bader Sabtan (PhD candidate) 

League of Legends (LOL) is the most popular, viewed game in Esports, peaking at 4.1 million concurrent viewers and 664,100,000 hours watched in 2021. A constant problem in Esports is that players do not perform to their expected potential when under stress (also known as choking). In the literature, training under stress is a well-known choking intervention that has worked in other domains (e.g., traditional sports and the military).

Designing Better Teammates by Understanding Ourselves

Research seminar 

Robotic teammates have the unique advantage and challenge that we have the ability to design them, and while we may know what we desire in a teammate, actually manifesting those characteristics is difficult.  In order to achieve the goal of creating our desired teammate it requires a greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the design elements as well as ourselves.  In this presentation Paul Stegall will present prior work on the use of exoskeleton devices for rehabilitation and pathology identification, current work on human abi

Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics, Autonomous Human-Robot Interaction, and Wearable and Soft Robotics

Research seminar 

In this talk, Dr. Mojtaba Sharifi will go over the research projects he has done in the field of Rehabilitation and Assistive Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and Soft Robotics in the past twelve years. His presentation is organized in three sections, which cover his research achievements from his MSc to Postdoc. The first one is devoted to his research area during the MSc and Ph.D. programs on the “Control of HRI: Medical Robotic and Tele-Robotic Systems”.

Wireless medical microrobots

Research seminar

Autonomously moving microrobots that can be controlled remotely have enormous potential for innovative biomedical applications such as non-invasive surgery, drug delivery or cell manipulation.  This talk will present different approaches to the development of such wireless microrobots, ranging from biohybrid to bioinspired systems. Biohybrid and biomimetic approaches are very attractive because they exploit the naturally optimized designs and propulsion sources of biological swimmers.

CoBotics: Co-Designing Soft, Smart Robots that Enhance Human Capabilities in Surgery and Rehabilitation

Research seminar 

Surgical robots and exoskeletons save lives and enable independence. However, their access, acceptance and use are limited by usability barriers and cost-benefit comparisons with conventional practice. My talk will demonstrate soft robotics techniques and transdisciplinary design strategies that address these challenges and stimulate the discovery of new application areas in engineering and medicine.

Autonomous Medical Robots Guided by Real-Time 3D Imaging

Research seminar 

Modern surgical procedures require delicate tissue interactions and thus benefit greatly from the precise manipulations offered by medical robots. Similarly, live 3D imaging modalities (e.g., optical coherence tomography [OCT], ultrasound) offer rich clinical data streams useful for guiding surgical instruments.

Small-scale Magnetically Actuated Robotic Tools for Biomedical Applications

Research seminar 

Small scale robots have the potential to offer many unique applications for minimally invasive surgery, sensing and drug delivery in healthcare as well as more generally for microfactories and as scientific tools. They are precise end-effectors that can manipulate objects with a high degree of accuracy. Many surgical and on-chip tasks can be performed by manipulating these robots in their dedicated environments.