One of our 10 #Sochi2014 gold medal winners, @BobsledKaillie @HeatherMoyse | #WeAreWinter pic.twitter.com/8W3bW0VDf8

— CDN Olympic Team (@CDNOlympicTeam) February 23, 2014

Going out with a smile: Waterloo grad Heather Moyse was named co-flagbearer with her bobsled teammate Kaillie Humphries, and the pair led the Canadian Olympic team during the closing ceremonies yesterday for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Moyse and Humphries successfully defended their gold medal in the two-man bobsled event.

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Hilary Mason talks Big Data Friday

with files from June Macdonald.

Renowned data scientist Hilary Mason will be visiting campus on Friday, February 28 to talk about Big Data.

Mason, Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners and formerly Chief Scientist of Bitly, was named one of Fast Company's Top 100 Creative Minds in Business for 2013.

At 9:00 a.m. Friday, Mason will be at the Velocity Residence on Waterloo's main campus for a Master Class. This exclusive engagement is limited to 50 students. Registration details are online.

The master class event is being held as the precursor to a full weekend of activities on the Stratford Campus: The Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) Inspiration Day.

Data researchers, students, data geeks, businesspeople and interested public are invited to an address by Mason, who will talk about how Big Data, which refers to any collection of data sets so large they cannot be processed using traditional data applications, is being used to understand everything from social media usage, consumer behaviour, and social uprisings to virus outbreaks, weather patterns, population growth and municipal planning requirements. The results are not only revolutionizing businesses but are helping expand the understanding of human behaviour.

Mason knows a thing or two about large amounts of data. Bitly is the company whose link-shortening service facilitates sharing across Twitter, Facebook, and many other social media platforms. Bitly links are shared tens of millions of times a day, with hundreds of millions of clicks per day; they’ve shortened tens of billions of URLs in the company’s lifetime. That’s a lot of data. As Chief Scientist, Mason sifted through the records of these clicks to find patterns. She can show you what time of day people use their desktops versus their tablets; she can explain how social media usage was shaped by the Arab Spring. She can tell you, if people visit your website, what other pages they’re probably looking at.

In addition, the Stratford Campus has also invited acclaimed researcher and designer Nadia Amoroso from the University of Toronto and her colleague Haim Sechter of DataAppeal to explain how using Data Visualization techniques can increase both the understanding and the appeal of Big Data sets in order to communicate that story to the world.

The Inspiration Day activities get underway at 12:00 p.m. at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus. Registration details are available online.

The CODE Inspiration Day Program is open to all and takes place from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., in both Toronto and at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus, before the start of the Open Data Hackathon. The Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) is the first national Open Data hackathon in Canada. It is a 48-hour competition hosted by XMG and supported by the Government of Canada, starting at 5:0 p.m. on February 28 and running through 5:00 p.m. on March 2.

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Town halls to provide updates on strat plan

Waterloo’s new Strategic Plan—A Distinguished Past, A Distinctive Future—charts a course that will allow this University to be recognized one of the top innovation institutions in the world. The success of the plan, however, depends on the community's collective ability to turn ideas into action.

As the strategic plan has moved from consultation to implementation, teams of experts are indeed putting it into action, streamlining and prioritizing the actions needed to build each area of strength.

A special series of town hall meetings—Mini Town Halls—are being organized to give members of the university community an opportunity to learn what it will take to move Waterloo's eight strategic priorities from paper to practice as the theme leads present their progress.

Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions about Waterloo's strategic priorities, learn details of the action plans that support each strategic priority area, and hear from expert advisors and graduates committed to building a better university.

As with the Fall and Spring town hall meetings, questions can be submitted in advance to townhall@uwaterloo.ca, and the conversation can be joined using the #UWth hashtag and by following @uWaterlooLIVE.

Each town hall will be hosted by Feridun Hamdullahpur.

Upcoming sessions, each based around one of the strategic plan's themes, are scheduled as follows:

• Entrepreneurship - March 6, 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., location TBA. Watch the live webcast
• Transformational Research - March 18, 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., location TBA
• Internationalization - April 2, 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., location TBA

Save the date now for these events. Locations, dates and themes for the remaining town halls will be announced in the near future.

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Waterloo chemists revolutionize drug testing

by Katharine Tuerke.

A new testing protocol developed by chemists at the University of Waterloo will revolutionize current drug testing methods at major sporting events like the Olympics.

A team of chemists from the Faculty of Science has developed a fully automated method for analyzing urine. The research, funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) , appears in a recent issue of Analytica Chimica Acta.

“The challenge was to develop a robust method that could quantify hundreds of chemically different compounds,” said Ezel Boyaci, post-doctoral fellow and one of three lead authors of the study. “This automated method minimizes human error and speeds up processing time all in one test.”

WADA is faced with policing a growing list of banned substances in thousands of samples that need to be processed quickly. Officials at the Sochi Winter Olympics were expected to perform nearly 2,500 tests over 17 days, with a further 1,200 tests after the games.

Faster method processes sample in two minutes

The test allows officials to screen athletes across the drug spectrum with a single, automated analysis. It involves a 96-sample tray, and takes less than three hours to process, or two minutes per sample, on average.

The procedure simultaneously measures 110 doping compounds and their metabolites, such as narcotics, steroids, diuretics, hormones, stimulants, and cannabinoids. Current methods can only detect a few substances or similar classes of compounds at a time.

Waterloo's method to detect banned substances in urine employs solid phase microextraction (SPME), a technique that uses a solid coating to selectively extract specific substances. Because SPME covers so many compound classes, it can also cover substances that will appear later on the World Anti-Doping Agency's growing list.

Method can test older samples for new banned substances

“Retrospective studies for substances that we didn’t know about at the time will be easier with our method,” said post-doctoral fellow Angel Rodriguez-Lafuente, another lead author on the study.   

The method meets performance values of WADA and is ready for the next stage of clinical trials. Next, the chemists hope to develop similar detection methods for prohibited substances in blood and saliva samples.

The research team consisted of Professor Janusz Pawliszyn and post-doctoral fellows Ezel Boyaci, Krzysztof Gorynski, Angel Rodriguez-Lafuente and Barbara Bojko. Professor Pawliszyn holds a Canada Research Chair in New Analytical Methods and Technologies.

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Transition underway in Human Resources

In an effort to improve customer service and efficiency, changes will be taking place in Human Resources.

That's the gist of a memo circulated in mid-February and a news item posted on the Human Resources website.

"In order to ensure efficient service and support, the HR Operations group within Human Resources is undergoing a transition. The first phase of this transition moves administrative tasks performed by the payroll group to our newly formed HR Administration group," says the memo. "Over the next several months and through the remainder of the year, we will be making additional changes and process improvements and will keep you informed of any new process or staff related changes that may affect you."

Effective immediately, the following changes are in place:

• All new hire and re-hire administration processes including benefit sign-ups are now handled by HR administration. All paperwork requiring processing can be sent through inter-campus mail to “HR Administration”. Related phone and email inquiries can be directed to x35935 or HRHelp@uwaterloo.ca
• The payroll team structure is no longer divided into two separate client groups. All payroll specific inquiries (i.e. regarding payments, taxes, deductions, T4/T4As, etc.) can be directed to the main HR line x35935 or payroll@uwaterloo.ca

Upcoming changes over the next year include:

• All termination and employee movements (transfers, promotions, leaves of absence etc) will be transitioned to the HR Administration group.
• A central e-mail and phone number for HR administration and payroll related inquiries will be launched to provide central support and increased service levels

Anyone with questions can contact:

• Shona Dunseith – Manager, HR Administration ext. 31126
  
• Holly Gill – Manager, Payroll ext. 36682
  
• Kimberley Snage – Assistant HR Director, Operations ext. 38973

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