Looking more than ever like a microchip, after dramatic infill from recent construction projects, the main campus still features gold and russet trees in most areas, especially along and west of Laurel Creek. The aerial view is facing south, with the H roof of the Davis Centre noticeable at lower left.

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Board's quarterly meeting held in E5

The university’s board of governors will hold its quarterly meeting today, with a busy agenda full of dollars and issues — and one big celebration.

A highlight of the afternoon is expected to be a report in which Meg Beckel, the vice-president (external relations), will tell the board just how many millions were raised by Campaign Waterloo, which officially closed September 30 after almost a decade of inviting support from alumni, friends, corporations, employees and students.

The board meeting, which starts at 2:30 in Engineering 5 room 6004, is to be followed by an invitation-only President’s Reception for major donors, an opportunity for more happy words about the success of the campaign. Beckel says in her written report in the board agenda that Campaign Waterloo “has inspired bold ideas, ambitious plans, and stunning generosity to help Waterloo push boundaries, make new discoveries, and redefine the cutting edge”.

Before kicking back at the reception, though, board members will have to deal with these agenda items among others:

• Briefings on student retention issues, the new “student success” office, and the planned appointment of an associate provost (students), similar to the ones heard by the university senate last week.

• The university’s 2009-10 financial statement, a largely technical document that shows Waterloo’s total assets as $1.284 billion as of April 30, 2010.

• Reports on the work of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and on the relationship between the university and the “federated university and affiliated colleges” (St. Jerome’s, Renison, Conrad Grebel and St. Paul’s).

• Plans for construction of an addition to the Health Services building, largely paid for by students through a special fee that was approved in a referendum last year.

• A proposed new “statement of investment policies and procedures” for the faculty and staff pension fund, emphasizing long-term returns (“investing in companies at prices below their underlying long-term values to protect capital from loss and earn income over time”).

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Prof helps lead automotive software project

a release from the school of computer science

Thanks to $10.5 million in funding from Automotive Partnership Canada, and $6.1 million from industry partners General Motors of Canada Ltd, IBM Canada, and Malina Software Corp, CS professor Jo Atlee and her newly announced national research network can now begin their five-year mission to tackle the technological challenges related to the growing complexity of automotive software systems. (The Automotive Partnership program is also funding a Waterloo-based project focused on electric car development, announced last week.)

With eighteen years of research and teaching experience at Waterloo, Atlee (left) will be co-leading the Network on Engineering Complex Software Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems with McMaster University’s Tom Maibaum, Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Software Engineering. Other universities in the network include McGill, Queen’s, British Columbia, Toronto, Victoria and the Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montréal.

NECSIS will focus on the advancement of an emerging methodology called model driven engineering. MDE reduces the complexity of developing software by focusing on models and their relationships, reflected in the designs, code and documents that developers work with, enabling them to test and verify models even before the code exists.

“The idea of a network of researchers working on model-based software engineering has been brewing for a number of years,” explains Atlee, “but there were few software companies that practiced this style of software development and therefore we had few models of real-world software to work with. That has changed in the last few years. The automotive domain is now the key adopter and driver of this new paradigm of software development.”

Says Maibaum: “Computer systems in vehicles are managing more and more operations and increasing in complexity. That adds up to tens of millions of lines of software code that must work flawlessly and seamlessly together, and achieving this is becoming increasingly challenging using current approaches to software development.”

Bruce Ross, president of IBM Canada, says now is the time to make it happen. “In an era where billions of devices are being interconnected to enable intelligent decisions, the time is right to create and to innovate development processes using real-time navigational capabilities that will help build a smarter car.”

The network will be based in the new McMaster Automotive Resource Centre being developed at McMaster Innovation Park. The same facility will house research initiatives related to new hybrid powertrain and lightweight materials. MARC is being developed as an innovation ecosystem, promoting daily interactions among industry, university and government on market-oriented and industry-driven research.

“As one of the network team members said, ‘this is the best research project that I've ever been involved with; both with respect to the research being proposed and the ‘dream team’ of researchers and engineers that we've put together',” explains Atlee.

When this dream team gets going expect even more collaboration not only from them but also from students in software engineering at the network universities. Waterloo students “will have frequent interactions and collaborations with their counterparts throughout their studies including opportunities for lab visits, student exchanges, and internships at the companies.” Student collaboration will allow them to not only “see how their work fits into the much larger research context, they will see how it fits into the context of real-world software development. They will also develop large support networks of colleagues throughout the NECSIS network, and these social networks will help them throughout their careers.”

Atlee and her team can’t wait for all this to begin. “I'm very excited that this project has been recognized and funded, and I'm keen to get started. We all are.”

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Election results and other Tuesday notes

There will be no change to the three municipal leaders who hold seats on UW's board of governors, as Waterloo mayor Brenda Halloran, Kitchener mayor Carl Zehr and Region of Waterloo chair Ken Seiling were all returned to office in yesterday's elections. So were Cambridge mayor Doug Craig and Stratford mayor Dan Mathieson. Voters in Waterloo said no, by a very narrow margin, to water fluoridation. They also said no, by a two-to-one majority, to "discussions" about amalgamation of the Twin Cities, even though Kitchener voters said yes to the same question.

Waterloo's seven-member city council will include two newcomers, one of them a university staff member: Jeff Henry, academic integrity officer in the faculty of mathematics, was elected to represent ward 6, which includes the area around the central campus. Margaret Johnston of the dean of engineering office was elected to a Kitchener seat on the Waterloo Region District School Board. Tom Galloway, of the plant operations department, was re-elected as a Kitchener representative on Regional council. And Roger Watt, retired from information systems and technology, won a council seat in Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh Township in Huron County, where he has his summer home. Election results are online this morning in various formats: Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge, Woolwich, Stratford, Toronto.

The streak continues, as a Waterloo team will be going to the world finals of the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest again this year. Ondrej Lhotak of the school of computer science reports: "The Waterloo Black team of Tyson Andre (1A SE), Brian Bi (1A CS), and Hanson Wang (2A CS) finished first out of 112 teams from 56 universities and colleges competing in the East Central North America Regional Programming Contest, which was held at four sites including the University of Windsor. The team finished ahead of runners-up Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This result earns the team a spot at the World Finals to be held in early March in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Waterloo's other two teams, Gold (Minghao Dai, John Liu, and Aurick Qiao) and Red (Felix Fung, Justin Simpson, Robert Xiao), finished 8th and 16th, respectively. The next best Canadian teams were Brock in 10th place, York in 12th place, and Toronto in 17th place." Waterloo teams have qualified for the world finals each year since 1993, and have been world champions twice.

Peter Ratcliffe, a renowned medical doctor and biological researcher, will speak on campus today, telling high school students why he became a scientist and then reporting on his research to an afternoon audience. Ratcliffe, of the University of Oxford, is one of this year’s recipients of the Gairdner International Award, regarded as Canada’s most prestigious medical research prize. As part of the Gairdner's mandate to communicate the work of medical researchers to others, current and past Gairdner winners visit universities across Canada. “His talk will certainly inspire and encourage students to consider entering science programs,” says Terry McMahon, Waterloo’s dean of science, about the morning lecture (10:30 in the Humanities Theatre). For more than 20 years, Ratcliffe’s research has focused on how cells in the body detect the amount of oxygen available to them, and especially how they respond to a lack of oxygen. This has led to a better understanding of the development of illnesses, such as cancer or cardiovascular disease, where a lack of oxygen in cells plays a role. The afternoon lecture — “How Cells Sense Oxygen” — draws on that work and will start at 1:00, also in Humanities. More details are online.

Here's a reminder that Wednesday is the deadline for faculty and staff members to submit questions for a "town hall meeting" with the university's president and provost. The agenda for the November 2 event, as listed on an invitation that's been e-mailed across campus, includes “Student Success, Engagement and Retention — Working collaboratively to transform the student experience in and out of the classroom” and “Excellence in Research and Scholarship — Advancing Waterloo’s position nationally and around the world”. (But questions on all campus-related topics are welcome.) As in the past, I’ve been asked to collect, screen and organize the questions, which will be passed along to the top officials without an indication of who asked them. Questions should be submitted to the special e-mail address townhall@ uwaterloo.ca. Time permitting, questions can also be asked right at the meeting on November 2, which will start at 3 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre.

The WatCard office sends word that it's now possible to add funds to an individual card with Interac debit, as well as such existing technologies as Visa, MasterCard and American Express. • In case you hadn't noticed (which I confess I hadn't), take note that the offices of the independent studies program have moved to East Campus Hall from their previous cramped quarters in the Modern Languages building. • Alternatives Journal, published in Waterloo's faculty of environment, is inviting articles for a planned issue on "Music and a Green World".

And a correction to Friday's Daily Bulletin: credit goes to not one faculty member but two who supervised the doctoral thesis of Alexander Wong, the winner of this year's alumni gold medal for the top-ranking PhD graduate. He was supervised by David Clausi and Paul Fieguth of the systems design engineering department.

CAR

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