Waterloo Daily Bulletin July 7, 2011

UWAFT wins top spot in EcoCAR final

The University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team (UWAFT) (above, in a photo taken last February) was the top-ranking Canadian team and took third place overall in the final phase of the three-year EcoCAR Challenge held last month in Washington, D.C.

Waterloo’s vehicle also won first prize for Best Overall Outreach Program as well as awards for Best Media Relations Campaign, Best Sponsor Success Story, Best Consumer Campaign, and Best Final Presentation.

The team, made up of engineering, business, and environment students from the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, was one of 16 university teams from across North America that have spent the last three years re-engineering a donated General Motors vehicle into the next generation EcoCAR, says a news release sent out by Eric Mallia, the team’s director of outreach and a master’s student in environment and resources studies.

See-through image of UWAFT vehicle “The UWAFT team designed and built a hydrogen fuel cell plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that performed as well as, and in some categories better than, the original gasoline vehicle, while reducing the vehicle’s tailpipe emissions to zero (only water)."

(A see-through image similar to the one above is on the team’s website, with labels to identify key components.)

"Other teams in the competition built vehicles that run on ethanol, biodiesel and electricity (battery only). UWAFT was one of only two teams that chose hydrogen as their preferred fuel.

“The EcoCAR competition challenges student teams to transform a GM-donated vehicle by minimizing fuel consumption and reducing emissions while retaining the vehicle’s performance and consumer appeal. UWAFT was the highest-ranking Canadian team when the final scores were tallied.

“During the 10-day final competition in June, students competed in several dynamic and static events. The first five days of competition were held at GM’s Milford Proving Grounds in Michigan where the teams showcased the capabilities of their vehicles. UWAFT had a strong showing in several technical categories, including fuel consumption, emissions reductions, and driving performance (acceleration, towing capacity and the autocross race)....

“The second week of the final competition was held in Washington, D.C., where students presented their team’s design strategies and community outreach activities.... In all, the team won $10,000 in prize money that it can use to reinvest in its next competition, EcoCAR2: Plugging into the Future, which begins this fall."

Professor Angus Kerr-Lawson passes

When Angus Kerr-Lawson (left), a faculty member at the University of Waterloo for nearly 40 years, was awarded the honour of Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the June 16 convocation, his daughters attended the ceremony to accept the honour on his behalf. Professor Kerr-Lawson was in hospital at the time; he died the following Monday, June 20.

Tim Kenyon, chair of the philosophy department, prepared the tribute that follows.

Professor Kerr-Lawson served with excellence as a faculty member in both philosophy and pure mathematics at Waterloo from 1958 to 1996. He took on many crucial roles, serving as mathematics department chair and on the Senate Executive Committee and the university’s Board of Governors.

Since Angus's retirement, his work in the field of American philosophy, always respected, has increasingly been recognized as foundational to aspects of the field. He was a distinguished, internationally known scholar of the mathematics and logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, and of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. He is best known, though, for his extensive work on the philosophy of George Santayana.

It is no exaggeration to say that Angus was one of the top few living English-language scholars of Santayana. Indeed, it is rare to encounter an English-language book or journal article on Santayana that doesn't engage Angus, either by thanking him in the acknowledgements, or by directly focusing its attention on his work. Thus the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy honoured Angus for his contributions to the field in 2008, while the journal Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society published a special issue devoted to his work in 2009.

Angus published a substantial body of peer-reviewed philosophy journal articles on central figures in 19th- and early 20th-century American philosophy. He also contributed book chapters on Peirce and Santayana to collections edited by some of the most distinguished living scholars of American philosophy.

Yet the larger component of his philosophical work appeared elsewhere – in Overheard in Seville, the bulletin of the Santayana Society, which he himself edited from 1983 to 2006. In this journal he published 24 articles between 1983 and 2009. Overheard in Seville is the primary locus for scholarship on Santayana. Without this journal and Angus's tireless stewardship of it, Santayana scholarship would be decades behind where it is today.

Angus was a very fine scholar and a respected member of the university community. His intellectual generosity and great collegiality will not be forgotten by those fortunate enough to have worked or studied with him.

There will be a gathering of friends and family to celebrate Angus Kerr-Lawson’s life on Saturday, July 23, at 2 p.m. in the chapel at Conrad Grebel University College. A reception will follow afterwards in the Great Hall at Conrad Grebel.

Research group targets software problems

A research group in computer science is offering help to faculty members who are developing software to solve problems in their own research, but who are not entirely certain how to proceed in certain key areas.

“Are you thinking of having some software developed for an application to solve a problem in your research area?” inquires computer science professor Daniel Berry. “Have you tried to determine features and their requirements for an application to solve a problem in your research area but are having trouble defining a suitable creative set of features that your programmers will be able to implement?”

Berry, with PhD candidate Ali Niknafs, of the software engineering group in Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, offer their skills “to help you form focus groups that will quickly identify a creative set of features and their requirements. How to do so well is the concern of our primary research, and one of us does this activity in his consulting business.

“We would like to help you form focus groups for identifying requirements for your application. Why are we willing to help? By helping you, we will be able to answer some research questions about the best way to organize these focus groups.

“If you and others who know about the problem agree to participate in a number of these focus groups that we will facilitate about your application, we will provide you with the list of all creative features and their requirements for the application that that are generated during the focus groups. These can be given to your programmers to begin the development of the application.

“Because of our research questions, we will be forming several focus groups for each application, each operating in slightly different ways. We hope to be able to observe a difference in the quantity and quality of the ideas generated.

“No matter what, you get all of the ideas generated. Moreover, any data that we gather will be both anonymized and disguised so that none of your research secrets are revealed. In other words, the focus groups will be an experiment for us.”

The experiment's plan has been approved by the university’s Office of Research Ethics. Those interested may contact either Berry (dberry@uwaterloo.ca) or Niknafs (niknafs@gmail.com) with a description of the problem that needs to be solved with the application. “We are looking in particular for problems the average computer science student knows very little about,” Berry says. “We will be selecting problems for participation on the basis of this lack of knowledge.”

CPA staff

Thursday, July 7, 2011

UWAFT wins top spot in EcoCAR final

Professor Angus Kerr-Lawson passes

Research group targets software problems

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