Daily Bulletin

'Partnership' award for cryptography

The Synergy Awards for University-Industry R&D Partnerships are backed by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Conference Board of Canada. "The knowledge-based economy puts a premium on innovation, and collaboration is the key to improving Canada's innovation performance," says James Nininger, president of the Conference Board.

Certicom and UW are being honoured for "the development of the elliptic curve cryptosystem", a way of encoding electronic data. The award includes a $10,000 research grant for the university.

Certicom and UW go back some twenty years, says NSERC, explaining in a news release that UW research on "public-key encryption" of data led to the creation of the Data Encryption Group by Scott Vanstone, Ron Mullin and Gordon Agnew in 1983. "In 1985, with a little industrial experience and a few fundamental breakthroughs in mathematics related to cryptography, the three started a company called Cryptech, later renamed Mobius Encryption and finally Certicom Corp. in 1995. . . . Since 1985, Certicom has concentrated on researching, developing, marketing and selling the new generation of public-key technology based on elliptic curves, developed initially by the DEG. In fact, the DEG built the first chip to implement elliptic curve, public-key cryptography. Certicom commercialized the DEG's breakthrough and hired University of Waterloo graduates with experience in this sophisticated area of mathematics and engineering."

The Data Encryption Group is now UW's Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, and Certicom is a Mississauga-based public company with some 96 technical staff. The links between university and company continue to be strong, and Certicom is one of the sponsors of two senior industrial chairs in cryptography at UW, co-sponsored by NSERC, which were created last year.

Spring preregistration starts today

From program and course selections submitted at preregistration, a Student Registration Form/Fee Statement showing your schedule of classes, their times and rooms, will be produced and mailed to you. This will enable you to complete registration by mail and go directly to classes when you arrive on campus.

Select your courses using the Course Offerings List and the Legend of Abbreviations. A link from the Course Offerings List to the 1998-1999 Calendar will allow you to view full descriptions of the courses. Please note that some courses listed in the Calendar may not be offered.

Once you have selected your courses, enter all the requested information on the Preregistration Form. Be sure to list courses in order of preference. Also, for each course selected, please enter the "Course Index Number" in the appropriate place on your Preregistration Form. This number appears on the Course Offerings List with each course entry. You should be using the most recent copy of your personal computer-produced timetable (Student Registration Form) for Preregistration. You are asked to present this form with your New Course Requests to the appropriate Departmental Advisor

If you don't have your most recent timetable, you should check for it at the Registrar's Office in Needles Hall (Engineering and Optometry students should check with your departmental office). If required, another copy of this form may be reproduced for you.

Students should read the faculty and program regulations carefully to be sure that degree requirements are understood and met in the manner required by your program.

If you are thinking of changing your Faculty next term you should contact the appropriate advisor of the Faculty to which you wish to transfer.

"It's a huge net time savings," says CS academic advisor and lecturer Byron Weber Becker, who "cobbled together" the system. It's maintained by his colleague Troy Vasiga. Since it was introduced a year ago, some 450 CS students each term, roughly 40 per cent, have converted to on-line preregistration. Now the four part-time advisors in the department "see students we need to see, " says Becker, "those who have questions, problems, or need a little extra hand-holding. It's something we should have been doing for years."

To access the system, students fill out a Web form, and a program checks prerequisites and either gives students a confirmation message that they have successfully preregistered, or informs them that a prerequisite is missing. The information is placed in a database, printed out, then sent to the registrar's office where it must be input into that database. Since "it's not quite official," the system doesn't mesh with others. "It's really a pity," he laments. "We print it out, and they type it back in."

Aside from that drawback, and a couple of initial glitches, "it's been amazingly smooth. We're just ticked pink that 450 students are using it. This is a short-term, stop-gap measure," says Becker, noting that the campus-wide Student Information Systems will one day perform these feats for all students. In the meantime, the response from the CS students: "They love it."

The day of many speakers

Also today . . . The personal safety committee meets at 10:30 a.m. in Student Life Centre room 2134. Among the topics: the "date rape drug" Rohypnol. A surplus sale of UW property will be held today -- as it is on the first Wednesday of each month -- from 11:30 to 1:30 at central stores, East Campus Hall. The applied math department presents a fluid mechanics seminar on a large-scale subject today. Efim Pelinovsky of the Institute of Applied Physics at Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, speaks on "Recent Great Tsunamis in the World", at 2:30 in Math and Computer room 5136. The faculty of mathematics holds Mathematical and Computer Sciences Information Night from 4 to 8:30 this evening, with campus tours and briefings for potential math students. "Manufacturing Consent", the well-known film about linguistics professor and left-wing activist Noam Chomsky, will be shown at 7 tonight in room 267 of Conrad Grebel College. Howard Hampton, leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, will speak at 7 tonight in room N1001 of the science building at Wilfrid Laurier University.

James Gosling, the inventor of the Java programming language, will speak about the latest developments in Java at 9 a.m. in the Humanities Theatre. Admission is free. Gosling is vice-president and Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems, Inc., and the lead engineer and key architect behind Java, a Sun product that's now seen on Web pages everywhere.

Dan Dodge, co-founder of QNX Software Systems, will visit this afternoon to give away free copies of "a full suite of software targeted at the demanding needs of high-tech research". A total of 1,000 copies are available to individual students, faculty and staff as a gift from QNX to Waterloo. Dodge was this year's recipient of the 1998 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation from UW. He is a Waterloo graduate, who with fellow-student Gordon Bell founded QNX to continue work on operating systems that they had done during their undergraduate years. The presentation will come at a special seminar at 1:30 in Davis Centre room 1302.

Paul Hoffert, author of The Bagel Effect: A Compass to Navigate Our Wired World, will speak about his new book at 4:30 in Davis Centre room 1302. He's brought to campus by the bookstore. Hoffert, a faculty member at York University, uses the "bagel" metaphor to describe his view of how technology is affecting all areas of life -- from education and health care to business and the workplace.

Science fiction writer Robert Sawyer will speak about "Science Fiction as the Conscience of the Technological Age" at 7:30 p.m. in the Humanities Theatre. Admission is free. Sawyer's work displays a fascination with the clash between what he sees as "the two most potent forces in shaping human society -- science and religion". The author of The Terminal Experiment, Starplex and other works, he is president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer of America.

New name for the apartments

"The new name is not very colourful," admits Gail Clarke, director of housing and residence administration. But she says it at least reflects the nature of the buildings accurately, which the old name no longer did.

"During 1997," she notes, "we made a decision to give priority to full-time UW students when we received applications for our apartment accommodation (Towers and the Courts). As well, when the MSA lands became tax exempt, we offered a rent discount to current full-time UW students who are tenants from September 1998 to April 30, 1999. For some years now the residence name 'Married Students' Apartments' has not accurately reflected this residence population. In fact, its name can be quite misleading. We give priority to full-time UW students. We realised we needed to change the name of the residence and for now selected a name which is not colourful but does a better job of describing what kind of accommodation it is."

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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