Events & Recordings

Upcoming Events

Stay tuned for our fall newsletter to learn about WWINs upcoming programming for 2022-2023.

SAVE THE DATE – Truth Values Play (September 24, 2022)

Our Women in Mathematics group is bringing an award-winning play, Truth Values, to Waterloo campus on September 24, 2022. Truth Values is a true-life tale that offers a humorous, scathing, insightful, and ultimately uplifting look at the challenges of being a professional woman in a male-dominated field. Alumni, faculty, staff, students, and community members will all be welcome to attend at no cost. More details on this play will be sent in September.

Past Recordings

It’s not too late – you can still access these recordings in our library of previous events and lectures.

Preparing Students to Care About Responsible Technology (June 4, 2022)

The Dean’s Lecture during this year’s alumni weekend featured a conversation exploring the importance of using data and building technology that is responsible, fair and inclusive. In this presentation, Christiane Lemieux, Associate Dean, Operations and Academic, described our efforts to build enthusiasm for math, computer science, and data science in larger, more diverse groups of prospective students and enhance data science education to develop a new generation of versatile, entrepreneurial, and ethical data scientists.

Maura Grossman, Research Professor in the School of Computer Science, Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University and an affiliate faculty member at the Vector Institute of Artificial Intelligence, discussed how a clinical psychologist and lawyer ended up as a research professor in a school of computer science, and her mission to teach data science, computer science, and software engineering students to move slower and break fewer things.

Be Resilient. Be Healthy. | Women's Health Panel (March 10, 2022)

From day to day, you might fill the role of a student, parent, caregiver, or one of many other roles. Regardless of the one (or many!) you play, we all face the challenge of keeping well.

In this workshop, participants learned strategies for managing stress, burnout and improving their mental and physical health. Hosted by the Faculty of Health in celebration of International Women’s Day, Naturopathic Doctor Whitney Baxter (BSc ’10) and Physiotherapist Surabhi Veitch (BSc ’09) shared actionable strategies related to movement, nutrition and breath work.

WWIN Webinar Series: How Women are Changing the Economy, Wealth Management and Giving (November 18, 2021)

In this fireside chat we sat down with two inspiring Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics alumni- Milica Stojanovic (BMath '11), Director, Investment Management at CI Investments, and Selma Sahin (BMath ’77), Independent Knowledge Management Consultant, while they discussed the impact women are having on the economy and wealth management.

Rubik’s Cube: The math behind the best-selling puzzle toy of all time! (June 5, 2021)

This family-friendly event showcased a unique side of the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics. The Rubik’s Cube—the world’s best-selling puzzle toy—was the focus of the event as participants were able to improve their cubing skills with math! Alumnus Erik Demaine (MMath '96, PhD '02) shared the mathematics behind the Rubik’s Cube to reveal an efficient algorithm for solving cubes in any state. Afterwards, Michael Shao (BCS '14), Chris Quattrociocchi (BSc '14) Sarah Strong (BMath '15), Kevin Matthews (BMath '16) and Bill Wang (BMath '21) shared the history of the University of Waterloo’s Rubik’s Cube Club and led breakout rooms so participants learned how math could make them better cubers.

WWIN Webinar Series: Creating Your Own Path: Opportunities, Sustainability and Lessons Through COVID-19 (March 24, 2021)

In this fireside chat we sat down with two inspiring leaders – Joanne McKinley (BMath'00, MMath'02), Waterloo’s 2020 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation recipient and Director of Software Development at Google, and Sandra Banks, Vice-President, University Relations at Waterloo – as we discuss the impact and changes COVID-19 has had on women in the workforce. As an advocate for work-life balance, Joanne talks candidly about her experiences gaining increasing responsibility in her career while prioritizing family.

To view WWIN webinars prior to 2021, click here.

Distinguished Lecture Series

The Distinguished Lecture Series annually showcases a handful of outstanding thinkers in the field of computer science, giving them a forum to present their views and ideas to students, faculty and interested public. Many of these speakers are engaging and inspiring women in computer science, who are changing the game at their institutions.

We wanted to highlight our most recent speaker and share their digital recording. All lecturers and recordings from 2004 onward can be found here.

Raquel Urtasun — An AI Approach to Self-Driving (October 7, 2021)

In this talk, Raquel Urtasun, the Founder and CEO of Waabi Innovation Inc., a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI, shares enhancements and research in the self-driving space. Self-driving is one of the most exciting and important technologies of this generation. Once solved at scale, it will change the world as we know it. The industry has made meaningful progress, but commercial deployment is still limited by traditional approaches that don’t take full advantage of the power of AI, and are technically cumbersome and costly to scale. AI is our single greatest key to unlocking self-driving. In this talk, I will discuss our breakthrough AI-first approach — bringing the promise of self-driving closer to commercialization than ever before.

Mary Czerwinski — Using Technology for Health, Wellbeing and Empathy (January 14, 2021)

How can we create technologies to help us reflect on and change our behaviour if needed and improve our health and overall wellbeing both at work and at home? In this talk Mary Czerwinski, Partner Research Manager, Human Understanding and Empathy (HUE) Research Group, Microsoft Research, briefly describes the last several years of work their team have been doing in this area. They have developed wearable technology to help families manage tense situations with their children, mobile phone-based applications for handling stress and depression as well as automatic sensing systems for tracking well-being over time. Their latest focus agents can help with planning and focus and recommend good times to take a break at work. The overarching goal in all of this research is to develop intelligent systems and agents that work with the user so that they can maximize their goals and improve their wellbeing over time.