Thiru Sinnathamby’s $500,000 gift funds AI for water risk at Waterloo

Thiru Sinnathamby (BASc ’01, electrical engineering), Vice-President of Engineering at NVIDIA, invested $500,000 to establish the Sinnathamby Professorship in AI for Sustainable Solutions in Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering. His family also helps fund wells in Africa and Asia through groups such as Charity: Water.

Dr. John Quilty of Civil and Environmental Engineering leads the research it supports. His graduate team builds AI models that follow water from source to tap, forecast river flow, optimize reservoir operations and predict contamination. Better predictions for rare 50 to 100-year floods already feed a forecasting partnership with Natural Resources Canada.

PhD student Soheil Khosravi is building reservoir-operation models that include the physical dynamics and operating limits of the reservoir, so water managers can see why a release decision makes sense. Quilty says the professorship let him recruit the students for the work.

Sinnathamby, who benefited from co-op as a student, calls the idea a multiplier effect: students who see an alum invest in their work may one day do the same for someone else.