![[University of Waterloo]](/goldbar.gif)
| Yesterday | Tuesday July 15, 2003
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Editor: Chris Redmond credmond@uwaterloo.ca |
Midnight Sun still in the leadUW's Midnight Sun VII solar race car team continues to lead the American Solar Challenge after the first leg of the 10-day event. "It was a close call," says team member Calli Citron, but adds, "It's really hot and sunny and the car is loving it." Today the team will attempt to defend its first-place position as it travels route 66. |
![[Vechtomova]](/images/2003/0701vechtomova.gif)
"Working
with databases containing natural language is much more difficult than working
with relational databases containing structured data," explains Olga Vechtomova,
a new faculty member in management sciences.
Key word searching works well for the average Internet user, but it fails the researcher with more complex queries, where subtle shades of meaning are important. Most search engines will retrieve masses of irrelevant hits while missing related information described in different terms. For example, a keyword search on "energy costs" will find articles on hydro, nutrition, and the politics of oil, but it might miss articles on pollution.
Vechtomova takes a lexical-semantic approach (one based on understanding the meanings of words in context) to develop techniques for both expanding the search to include more relevant documents and defining the search more accurately, to exclude the irrelevant. She begins by analyzing a set of documents already known to be relevant, using the experimental search system Okapi. A program she developed as a module added to Okapi gathers all "collocations" of a search term (all words found within a 10 to 50-word window centred on each occurrence of the term) and analyzes them to see whether they are linked in meaning to the search term. The short list of meaningful collocations is then used to expand and define the search query in order to retrieve even more relevant documents.
While more experimentation is needed, Vechtomova hopes to some day see her techniques being applied in corporate decision-making systems as well as in sophisticated academic search tools.
A star among them is Jenna Schroeder, who brings with her not just a 92 average from Regina's Miller High School, but serious skills on the volleyball court. She's been an alternate on Canada's national junior team, and is well known to UW volleyball coach Jason Grieve, who coached her on a Saskatchewan junior team last year.
Quick poll resultsYesterday's bulletin posed the following question to UW staff:When academic support staff job descriptions are made public, should they include a USG rating?
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Heading for a degree in planning, Schroeder chose Waterloo ahead of Dalhousie partly on academics, partly on the opportunity to play for the Warriors. She'll be joining some other Grieve recruits -- all trained at the Forest City Volleyball Club in London, Ontario:
Other Warrior coaches have been going through just the same thing. Doug Hanes of the men's volleyball team, for instance, says 2003 has been "the best recruiting year that I have had," promising that five recruits he's found "will make a long-term impact, and one or two will make an immediate impact."
For his squad, the Warrior stars of the future include Dan Murray of Oakville, coming into environmental civil engineering; Travis Stone of Kitchener (arts applied studies); Lance Salmikivi of Kitchener (honours science); Kieran Slattery of Calgary (planning); and Kyle Hall of Georgetown (arts and business).
Tom O'Brien, coach of the women's basketball Warriors, has been on the recruiting trail too, coming back with the likes of Nicole Tisdale from Springdale, Ontario. "Nicole," he explains, "is an outstanding ball-handler who was selected over two hundred hopefuls to film a commercial with former Warrior standout Mano Watsa. She was recruited and offered scholarships by a number of Division I schools in the United States." But she's coming to Waterloo instead, to start in health studies.
Her newly recruited teammates will include Meaghan O'Reilly of Seaforth (honours arts); Gillian Maxwell of Kitchener (social development studies); Madeleine Noble of Orillia (kinesiology); Lindsay Offner of Huntsville (arts and business); and Taryn Spicer of Bracebridge (recreation and leisure studies).
![[On the phone]](/images/2003/0704calder.gif)
Submit now: That's the urging from Heather Calder, of Courseware -- "a comprehensive custom publishing service" operated by UW Graphics. "We help faculty and staff create quality learning materials for their students quickly and economically," a web site explains. "The books we create can be instructor notes, overheads from class, compilations of articles and sections of books, material from the worldwide web, and any combination of the above." Calder warns that the fall term is rushing towards us: "We'd like to remind instructors that they can submit their materials to us before they leave campus for holidays or study leaves, and that earlier is better in the light of the influx of students for this fall." Some orders can be submitted online; anyone with questions "about copyright requirements, texts that may have gone out-of-print, and anything else to do with Courseware" can reach Calder at ext. 3996. |
This morning's Record is reporting that Cambridge city councillors "voted unanimously last night to proceed with the University of Waterloo school of architecture project in downtown Cambridge." The vote came after a presentation by Rick Haldenby, director of the school, who showed plans for the re-development of the former Tiger Brand building on Melville Street -- the proposed new home of the school.
Chris Read, manager of the UW bookstore, says his team is working hard to get ready for a busy fall term. "We've already placed orders for over 1,000 titles for the fall, but that's nowhere close to the 2,500 we expect to be at on the first day of class." He urges faculty members to place their orders for fall texts as soon as possible, to ensure the right number of books are available to students in September. In anticipation of "the largest number of books we've ever stocked," Read says the bookstore is also working hard in preparation for Student Life 101, ExpressBooks online ordering, and will double its available cash registers to 16 in September.
To meet critical deadlines, the student awards office will be closed tomorrow (as opposed to today and tomorrow, as was mistakenly reported yesterday). The office will re-open on Thursday at 10 a.m.
Career services is offering a workshop for students called "Making Polished Presentations." Part 1 takes place today from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in TC 1208. Part 2 takes place on July 22 at the same time and in the same location. The cost to reserve a space is $20, which will be returned to participants at the second session. Register at www.careerservices.uwaterloo.ca.
A blood donor clinic continues in the Student Life Centre multipurpose room today. Donors should make an appointment at the turnkey desk.
Volunteer patient actors are needed for Operation Campus Wide, a large-scale training event, in which mock emergencies are set up across campus. UW's campus response team is then called to respond. The event will be held on Thursday from 4:30 to 9 p.m. For details or to volunteer contact crt@feds.Uwaterloo.ca or call ext. 3296.
Also on Thursday there will be an information session about the new master of business, entrepreneurship and technology program from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in DC 1304. For details contact Karen Gallant, ext. 7071. More about the program can be found on the Centre for Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology website.
C&PA