Oh, Canada: The crowd had many reasons to ooh and ahh besides the fireworks at the 30th annual Canada Day Celebration at Columbia Lake Field on Tuesday. Attendees were treated to illusionist Scott Hammell escaping from a straitjacket while dangling from a crane; stilt walkers, a wide variety of food trucks, a rare public appearance of the Tool (complete with Tool Bearers dressed in Canada Day finery); performances by Splash 'n Boots, Born Ruffians and Steven Page; a video of Chris Hadfield singing the national anthem; and of course, fireworks.

More information about the event can be found on its Storify page.

 

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Policy 40 is the latest updated

The Secretariat & Office of General Counsel (SOGC) has published the latest update on the status of the policy renewal project.

The University's board of governors approved exceptions to Policy 40 – The Chair at its meeting on June 3.

Says the policy project memo: "Those exceptions (see Amendment 1) were necessary in order to provide for the eligibility of the affiliated and federated institutions of Waterloo (AFIW) faculty members to serve as chair of the Department of Religious Studies and/or to serve on a nominating committee for the chair of that department, which is a collaborative undertaking between the University of Waterloo and the AFIW."

For details on the Policy Project, please refer to the webpage dedicated to institutional Policy Management at the University of Waterloo. Through this webpage, you will have access to the Policy Project, which is dedicated to the systematic review and renewal of institutional policies. That page includes:

• An overview of the policy project;
• A review schedule;
• Tools for use by the community; and
• The university’s policies, guidelines and procedures.

 

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Big Data "superstar" to speak on campus Friday

University of Waterloo alumnus Matei Zaharia will be speaking on campus on Friday, July 4 on a topic he knows a thing or two about: Big Data.

Big Data refers to computing using massive amounts of data, for example to glean customer insights from website browsing patterns.

Zaharia, who graduated with a BMath in Computer Science in 2008, has become something of a "open source superstar" according to Wired magazine.

“We worked together for three-and-a-half years while he did his Bachelor of Mathematics, and he was spectacularly good," says Professor Srinivasan Keshav, who taught and worked with Zaharia while he was an undergraduate. "He worked with me on a number of projects. We published five papers together, which is extremely rare for an undergraduate.”

Graduating with a 98.4 per cent average, Zaharia had his pick of graduate schools. “People were beating down his door trying to get him to join their grad program,” says Keshav. “In the end he decided to go to UC Berkeley.”

Zaharia graduate work was with high-profile computer scientists Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica, who personally invited Zaharia to work with them. A paper they co-authored, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” has been cited almost 7,000 times since its publication in 2010.

While at Berkeley, Matei started a research project called Spark. Spark is an “open source cluster computing system that supports real-time and sophisticated analytics on big data.” Spark soon outpaced other big data analysis systems, including the well-known Hadoop. Spark is now widely used in Silicon Valley by major players like Apple, Facebook, and Foursquare.

After completing his graduate studies, Zaharia received faculty offers from top-ranked universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon. He ultimately chose to work at MIT as an assistant professor.

He took a year off, however, to form Databricks, a company that is commercializing the work done with Spark.

It is in his Databricks capacity that Zaharia will be speaking Friday at 2:00 p.m. in AL116. His remarks, entitled “Making Big Data Interactive with Spark,” deals with how the “rapid growth in data volumes requires new computer systems that scale out across hundreds of machines” and how Spark, which runs up to 100 times as faster than previous systems, offers clean, easy-to-use interfaces and the potential for industry applications.

“He’s not just an academic, he’s also an implementer and a community builder,” says Keshav. “He’s also a genuinely nice person. You’d never know he was star.”

More information about the event is available on the Computer Science website.

 

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GreenHouse launches social innovation fund

by Sean Campbell.

GreenHouse, a social innovation community at St. Paul's University College, is launching a $5,000 Social Innovation Fund to support high-potential student projects that will have a positive environmental or social benefit.

The fund will be offered to GreenHouse students in both Fall and Winter terms. The Innovation Fund is different from ordinary pitch contests as students will need to demonstrate results, as well as form an advisory board of stakeholders and topic experts, in order to compete.

To learn more about joining GreenHouse, and become eligible to access the Social Innovation Fund, please contact Sean Campbell, program coordinator at GreenHouse.

More information about the Innovation Fund will be available in the Fall. Read more about the GreenHouse Social Innovation Fund in a recent article in Imprint.

 

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