Fire drills scheduled for tomorrow

The Safety Office, in partnership with UW Police Services and Waterloo Fire Rescue, will be conducting fire drills, beginning at 8:30am and ending at approximately 3pm, for most of the buildings located on main campus on Tuesday, April 30.

The drills are part of a required annual review of fire safety plans. All building occupants are expected to evacuate a building when the fire alarm sounds, even during scheduled drills.

Each building takes between 5 and 10 minutes to conduct the drill. In the event of inclement weather the drills will be cancelled.

 

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Thanking ARM for lending a hand

By Kristopher Cates-Bristol, Senior Development Officer, Waterloo Engineering

Engineering students will now be able to experience programming on up-to-date equipment thanks to the generous support of ARM Holdings, a world-leading semiconductor intellectual property supplier.

ARM’s donation of over $500,000 worth of hardware and software development platforms has been used to upgrade existing hardware and software in electrical and computer engineering’s microcomputer lab. The donation, made through the ARM University Program, will support numerous undergraduate labs, a graduate course, and fourth-year design projects.

In recognition of ARM’s generous support, a plaque has been installed outside a lab located in E2 (pictured at right).

When training the next generation of software and system engineers it is important to use state-of-the-art technology so they are prepared to adapt to the technology of the future. ARM processors power millions of devices around the world and most of today's cellphones and smartphones use a form of ARM processor. 

Additional places where you might not think that ARM processors are used include cars and transportation systems, space applications, scintillation detectors, digital cameras, routers, and recently even power-aware servers. They’re also used in medical devices, including implanted insulin pumps and heart pacemakers. ARM processors can even be used in smart cards.

“Modern embedded systems make life more fun, pleasant and safe,” says Sebastian Fischmeister, an electrical and computer engineering professor who heads up the university’s real-time embedded software group. “Embedded software is the driver behind these systems and modern applications are complex software programs that often control mission- and safety-critical systems.”

Among the donations from ARM are MCB1760 Evaluation Boards with ULINK-ME Debuggers from KEIL, an ARM subsidiary. These boards feature a Cortex-M3 ARM Processor and various state-of-the-art peripheral interfaces. The boards and the development tools will enable engineering faculty to train students on mainstream processors with interesting applications. One example for the use of these tools is the SE350 Operating Systems course. In this course, the students write a kernel for an operating system with pre-emption, memory management, and multi-programming support.

ARM’s IP, which enables the development of low power, high performance digital products, is at the heart of more than 35 per cent of all consumer devices worldwide. The ARM University Program aims to encourage the use of ARM processors as the basis for educational labs and university courses. The program provides a variety of teaching materials, development tools, and other resources for both faculty and students.

 

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Town Hall meetings next week

A pair of Town Hall meetings have been scheduled for Wednesday, May 8 from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. and Thursday, May 9 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre to give members of the university community an opportunity to hear from the President and Provost about the feedback received on the draft strategic plan.

Members of the campus community are being encouraged to pick the date that best works with their schedules and attend one of the two meetings.

The meeting will begin with a brief presentation from the President and Provost about the importance of the strategic plan to the university's success, what feedback has been received so far, and what the next steps will be towards implementation, including the the development of a framework to assess progress.

And another reminder that the deadline for submitting feedback via email on the draft strategic plan is noon on Wednesday, May 1.

 

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Monday's notes

Alumni Affairs Director Jason Coolman tweeted the photo at right of Feridun Hamdullahpur speaking at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California Friday at an event for Bay Area alumni organized by Alumni Affairs. According to Coolman it was a full house.

Today is the deadline for students to unlock the "Fees Arranged" achievement either by paying their tuition in full or submitting a promissory note for the amount. Details on how to do so are posted on the Finance-Student Accounts web site.

Human Resources has announced a number of faculty retirements, including a notice that Roger Pace, who began working at the university in July 1979 as a clinical resident, is retiring effective May 1, 2013 as clinical associate professor.

The following is a statement from Retail Services: "All Retail Services stores will be closed for inventory Monday, April 29th at 2:00 p.m.,  reopening Wednesday, May 1st at 9:00 a.m. For printing support please contact Laurie Weiler."

 

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