Students celebrating the end of the semester can get an early taste of summer as the University of Windsor Students’ Alliance hosts a pool party at Adventure Bay, the city’s new indoor water park.

Josh Paglione, director of student life, says that some students may have felt out of place checking out the family-oriented facility, but the party Thursday, April 17, is just for them.

“We’ve booked the entire park all to ourselves for a private experience for students and their friends,” he says. “It’s an alternative way to have some fun and de-stress.”

A disc jockey will provide a soundtrack while partiers race down the slides, splash in the waves, ride the surf or float down the lazy river. It’s an all-ages, alcohol-free event. Free shuttle buses leave Vanier Circle from 8 to 10 p.m., returning at midnight.

Admission is $5, with all proceeds to help fund treatment for UWindsor nursing student Jessica Girard, who is battling colon cancer. Buy tickets in the UWSA offices on the second floor of the CAW Student Centre, or online at www.adventurebay.eventbrite.ca.

The University of Windsor will move to 13-week academic sessions that include a Reading Week in each of fall, winter, and inter/summer semesters under a proposal approved by Senate.

Each semester would feature 12 weeks of instruction as well as a one-week break. The proposal will not change six-week courses that run during intersession or summer session.

Adding a fall reading week can contribute to student success, says acting provost Bob Orr.

“We appreciate that students at every level have different learning styles and experience various stressors during a term, both academic and personal,” he says. “Our intention is that introducing breaks in both semesters will support our students’ goals related to academic success.”

The University will implement the change in fall 2014, introducing a break through the week following Thanksgiving. Rob Crawford, president of the University of Windsor Students’ Alliance, says students welcome Fall Reading Week.

“This is something that students have been pushing for,” he says. “We are very excited to see the consideration given to addressing our needs.”

A lucky guess for student recruitment officer Katia Benoit won this week’s DailyNews quiz contest and its fabulous prize of a beautiful UWindsor coffee mug.

Benoit’s entry was drawn from all those which correctly identified human kinetics as the faculty most represented among Excellence in Mentoring Awards over the last 10 years, the Odette School of Business as the leader in producing Governor General’s Silver Medallists over the same period, and the Faculty of Science as graduating the most President’s Medal winners since 2004.

To help celebrate the University of Windsor’s 50th anniversary, DailyNews will run a contest at the beginning of each week, offering a prize donated by the University Bookstore. This week’s prize, a beautiful coffee mug with the University’s logo imprinted in white, is available in black or blue from the Bookstore kiosk in the CAW Student Centre at a cost of just $9.99.

Anand Kulkarni is inspired by nature. A research fellow at the Odette School of Business, he will explain how multi-agent systems use a decentralized approach to handle complex systems in his free public lecture, “Distributed Optimization and Swarm Intelligence,” at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in room 3000, Centre for Engineering Innovation.

“These agents together could be seen as a group of rational, self-interested and self-organizing learning agents,” Dr. Kulkarni says. “They compete and interact with one another to achieve the best possible local payoff, which eventually and collectively delivers the best possible global objective.”

His talk, hosted by the Cross-Border Institute and the civil engineering department’s Transportation Systems Innovation Lab, will highlight these techniques and their competitiveness in dealing with the ever-growing complexities found in transportation-related problems such as:

• vehicle fleet management and scheduling,
• logistics and vehicle routing,
• sensors deployment and networks,
• traffic control and several other associated systems.

Kulkarni is founder and chair of the Optimization and Agent Technology (OAT) Research Lab.

The University’s e-newsletter, DailyNews, will begin its summer publishing schedule next week, moving to two issues a week.

DailyNews will publish Mondays and Thursdays from April 21 to September 2, when it will resume daily publication. Holiday Mondays on May 19, August 4 and September 1 will push editions scheduled for these dates to the following Tuesday.

Please plan submissions accordingly.