A sea of red, white and enthusiasm

Canada Day was celebrated Sunday with some help from a national icon. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable (sorry, I don't have his name) took part in the onstage ceremonies highlighting UW's Canada Day party on the north campus, which drew the anticipated crowds in the tens of thousands.

Waterloo mayor Brenda Halloran is seen giving her welcoming remarks (the party also celebrated the city's 150th anniversary, not to mention UW's 50th). On stage with the mayor and the mountie are alumni mascot Pounce de Lion, Canada Day organizer (and math-and-business student) Ahinsa Mansukhani, Federation of Students president Kevin Royal, and UW president David Johnston. Photo by Michael Strickland.

From music to the red-and-white "clappers" that helped kids make noise, Canada Day was a success, says Nancy Heide of the communications and public affairs office. She sounded joyful but weary in an e-mail message early today summarizing the weekend: "It was amazing. Beautiful weather. Record crowds."

Sunday's party ended with fireworks, which most viewers had to see from below — most, but not all. A view from high above is available online as a video file. "It was filmed by Steven Snowdon, an undergrad student in math," writes Joe West of applied mathematics. "I was the pilot. There were three of us Cessna 172's in the air at the time, two of us orbiting the fireworks at 1,500 feet above the ground and a third watching from overhead Elmira. All of the planes were operated out of the Waterloo-Wellington Flight Centre (where the new UW aviation students will be training this coming winter)."

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Housing crunch shifts grad students

New housing has been arranged for “a number of the graduate, family and international students who had applied for Columbia Lake Village” this fall and won’t be able to live there because of high demand from first-year students.

University housing officer Chris Read said Friday that “we've secured a couple of blocks of apartment units” for this September, when the residence operation needs to find space for several hundred more first-year students than had been expected.

One of the off-campus sites is at 256 Phillip Street, known as the Phillip Street Townhouses — a total of 60 beds, in 18 three-bedroom and four-bedroom. We will be contacting single grads, international and exchange students from our applicant list to place students,” Read said. “Students will be signing 8 month leases with the property owner. Housing will be providing furniture in these units to assist this group with their transition. The proximity to campus is very attractive, as it' s closer than most of our own residences.”

The other block of space is in a new building just being finished at Erb Street and University Avenue. The final number of units involved there is “still to be finalized”, he said. “Our plan is to use these for families who had applied to our CLV North community. Students will sign 12-month leases with the property owner. We anticipate the building will be popular with this group of students — it' s a good layout for families and right on the bus line to campus (if they don' t want to walk!) and other amenities like grocery stores.”

As part of the plan to make space available for first-year arrivals, the graduate students — about 65 of them —currently living in CLV South will have to leave that complex and are being offered accommodation for the fall in CLV North. “They will be living with one other graduate student in shared townhouse accommodation,” Read said. “We are making every effort to make this a smooth transition for this group.

“We will be assisting these students, and any others, from our off-campus and admissions offices.”

Meanwhile, he reports that as first-year students finish their ranking of preferred accommodation (today’s the deadline), the option of a bargain-priced triple room in Ron Eydt Village “has drawn good interest. A number of students have listed this as their first choice, and many others in their top 4 choices (of 9 different room types available). We don't have final numbers yet, but we're pleased by the response so far.”

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Awards for two statistics profs

Two UW faculty members have received high awards from the Statistical Society of Canada, presented at the society’s annual meeting in St. John’s in mid-June.

The 2007 Gold Medal goes to UW’s Don L. McLeish (right). The Gold Medal is the highest award of the SSC and is awarded to “a person who has made substantial contributions to statistics or probability, either in mathematical development or in applied work.”

McLeish received his PhD from McGill University in Montréal and followed that with a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. He spent two years at York University and seven at the University of Alberta before coming to UW’s department of statistics and actuarial science in 1982.

Says a news release from the society: “Professor McLeish has been an outstanding researcher in probability and statistics throughout his career. His early work was on the asymptotic theory of martingales and in 1975 he originated the idea of mixingales which has had a great impact on a wide range of applications of probability and statistics.

“Professor McLeish has also been very active in the area of statistical inference and estimating functions. In 1988 and 1994 he and Professor Christopher Small published two books on this topic which are still widely cited. In recent years, Professor McLeish has been interested in quantitative finance and in 2005 published a book on Monte Carlo Methods in Finance which has been very well received.

“Professor McLeish has been extremely productive in his research, publishing 38 refereed papers as well as three books and scores of invited presentations. He has also supervised over 50 graduate students. His research has been continuously supported by NSERC since 1974 and he chaired the NSERC Statistical Sciences grant selection committee in 1982-83. In 1983 Professor McLeish was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He served as editor of the Canadian Journal of Statistics 1985-1988 and won the Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for the best paper published in that journal in 2002.”

Meanwhile, the society gave this year’s CRM-SSC prize to Richard Cook, also of UW’s department of statistics and actuarial science. The award, jointly sponsored by the SSC and the Centre de recherches mathematiques (CRM), is given each year to a Canadian statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the discipline during the first 15 years after earning a doctorate.

Cook's work in longitudinal and lifetime data analysis “has had immense impact on biostatistics, medicine and public health,” says the society. He “has made outstanding contributions to an impressive number of statistical research fields covering the design of clinical trials, hierarchical models, robust inference, and the analysis of survival, multi-state, and recurrent event data.

“His work is solidly grounded in important problems in public health and clinical trials and he has substantially raised the level of statistical expertise in the Canadian and international medical community through his important methodological advances in these fields.

“Richard Cook is gifted with great insight and a passion for closely knit collaborative work, one which truly embodies the sorts of interdisciplinary connections which form the cornerstone of rapid advances in medical and biostatistical research.”

Cook earned his BSc in statistics from McMaster University and his MMath, in 1989, and PhD, in 1993, from Waterloo. He joined the UW department in 1993 and holds adjunct appointments in the UW department of health studies and gerontology and in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. He was awarded a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Statistical Methods for Health Research in 2005.

Says the SSC: “Richard Cook is a leading international expert in longitudinal and life history data analysis. He has made ingenious contributions to the analysis of multi-state models and the joint analysis of multiple events. His joint work with Jerry Lawless has helped set current frameworks used in the analysis of recurrent events, and their jointly authored book The Statistical Analysis of Recurrent Events is to be published in July 2007.

“Characteristic of Richard Cook's research is the novelty and insight it brings to important problems in public health research. He has made exceptional contributions to the medical community and is one of their leading experts in methods for several application areas including rheumatology, cardiovascular disease, oncology, clinical trials and transfusion medicine. He has also provided great leadership through service on several medical advisory panels and medical research grant selection committees.” He has served as associate editor of the Canadian Journal of Statistics and Lifetime Data Analysis and as president of the Biostatistics Section of the SSC.

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A few notes to start a short week

Better start with a correction: Thursday's Daily Bulletin reported a UW team that placed third in a national competition for student automotive researchers, and misspelled the name of one of the winners. He is Farbod Nassiri, a mechanical engineering student.

Earlier last week, I wrote a bit sketchily about the massive gift that local executive Jim Balsillie has made toward the founding of a school of international affairs, describing the whole $50 million as a donation "to UW, Wilfrid Laurier University and the Centre for International Governance and Innovation". Not quite so, and Tobi Day-Hamilton of the dean of arts office explains the situation more accurately: "Jim has given UW and WLU $33 Million to establish the Balsillie School of International Affairs, a joint school. CIGI has also committed another $17 Million to the school. UW and WLU will each pitch in another $25M over ten years, making the total money going to establish the school $100M. In addition, the City of Waterloo has leased the land beside CIGI as a place to build the school. With this funding, UW and WLU will build a building, create/expand graduate programs and research. The goal is to have the leading school in international affairs in the country, if not North America."

School's out and camp's in. The yellow T-shirts that were visible around the Humanities building before 8:00 this morning signal the first session of the Arts Computer Experience camp. (ACE routine will be different from ever before, though, as the green north of the building that has been lunch and letting-off-steam area for 24 years of ACE youngsters has been converted to a construction site this year.) Meanwhile, UW's other major day camp, Engineering Science Quest, is under way in a network of rooms in several science and engineering buildings.

Mohamed Kamel, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been made a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the e-newsletter of the engineering faculty reports. He was honoured for his contributions to pattern recognition, image processing and intelligent systems. Kamel has studied co-operation in animals to assist in developing models of co-operation among intelligent machine systems and pioneered the use of pattern recognition for treasury bills and cheques. He serves as director of Waterloo Engineering's Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence research group.

As in past years, there will be a UW alumni outing to see some of Tennis Canada's Rogers Cup play later this summer. The match is happening at the Rexall Centre at Toronto's York University, August 11-19. The main UW event will be Thursday night, August 16, with a social gathering at the nearby Corona Pub followed by the evening's tennis. "As an alumnus of the University of Waterloo, you are invited to join the excitement at significant savings," says the alumni web site, noting that ticket discounts are available for every day of the tournament, not just the 16th. And there's more: "All students, faculty and staff can access the group discount tickets for any session — good deals for some good tennis," says Jude Doble of the alumni affairs office. The details are online.

CAR

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