Fusion 10

At the time of this post, we're partway through Day 2 of our trip to Waterloo.  After flying the red-eye, spending a morning at Niagara Falls in the cold and damp (but beautiful), we arrived at the University of Waterloo mid-afternoon on Sunday.  A tour of the campus was followed by dinner and a quiet game night.  An early bedtime prepared us for an early start and productive first day.

The first day started with a walk over to E5 (Engineering Building 5) which is serving as one of our two home-bases for the week.  We looked at defining innovation and design, worked with the head of the Engineering Outreach branch of the University to design better coffee cups (a project dear to my heart), looked at the psychology of bias in decision making with one of the Psychology department faculty, were introduced to a week-long project that we will be working through, and met and played a game created by old-boy, Rob Bolton (04) who drove in from his job at Idea Couture in Toronto to visit with us.  This was a busy and full day that wasn't over yet.
After dinner, we trekked across campus to our other home-base on campus to meet with the Engineering Student Society to talk about its role in campus life and problem-solve some of the real problems that they're wrestling with at the moment.  After that, the boys had some well-deserved down time to play a game of Humans vs Zombies and then board games, pool, and ping-pong.
This morning felt like a really early start as some construction that was going on late last night didn't help to make for a completely restful sleep for some.  We've launched into problem definition and had a trip to the Real-time Embedded Systems Laboratory to see 5 projects that are all working on ways of ensuring the safety human life and property through the embedding of systems within other systems to diagnose or protect those systems.  Examples included a test mechanism for ensuring that autonomous cars work effectively without crashing, and a system that prioritizing data traffic so that critical systems are never compromised on networks.  At the time of this writing, the boys are busy putting the ideas presented regarding problem definition into use in their personal projects.