David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

As AI companies mature, the industry is now on the hunt for high-quality training data.

As Serena Ge, a former Waterloo computer science student, explained in an earlier interview in the article Four Waterloo-founded startups earn $2 million seed funding, “For large language models to work efficiently they must be trained on a lot of data so they can understand how the world works.”

Five professors from the University of Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science have received the John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF), one of Canada’s top research grants.

In 1997, the federal government launched the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to spur world-class research and technology development in Canada. One of CFI’s core programs is JELF, which recognizes researchers who have demonstrated excellence in their fields and their proposed project is innovative, high-quality and meets international standards.

Postdoctoral researcher Besat Kassaie, Dr. Andrew Kane and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa have won a Best Paper Award at DocEng’25, the 25^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering.

Their paper, Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines, introduces new methods that improve how search engines handle mathematical queries.