David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Jeffrey Zang is a first-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo. At 15, he landed his first internship and completed four software internships before his 19^th birthday.  

Since high school, he has competed in 17 hackathons, where he built projects from an eye-tracking device to a conversational robot resembling former President Barack Obama. He became the youngest co-chair of Hack the 6ix, Toronto’s largest hackathon. With his help, the hackathon garnered more than 1,100 attendees and secured nearly $50,000 in sponsorship from companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte. He went on to organize six hackathons.

Recent PhD graduate Negar Arabzadeh has won the Early Career Researcher Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR).  

Negar won the award in SIGIR’s Community Engagement category, which recognizes outstanding professional service in the information retrieval community. The award ceremony took place at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, held in Melbourne, Australia.

Three Cheriton researchers won the Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), a leading cybersecurity and privacy conference.

SACMAT brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss novel approaches for access control, a security measure that determines who can access, use or interact with protected systems. Scanning your badge to enter your workplace or typing your username and password to log in to your Instagram account are examples of access control.