News

Recent master’s graduate Yelizaveta Brus, former postdoctoral researcher Rungroj Maipradit, Professor Earl T. Barr of University College London, and Professor Shane McIntosh of the Cheriton School of Computer Science have won an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2025, the 40^th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.

Their paper, Rechecking Recheck Requests in Continuous Integration: An Empirical Study of OpenStack, examined a common and costly issue in modern software development, namely, how developers should respond when a continuous integration system reports a failure that may not be caused by the code.

A research team led by Cheriton Professor Pascal Poupart and Carleton University’s Professor Sriram Ganapathi has received a $412,500 USD grant over two years from Coefficient Giving to make AI systems safer and stronger.

Coefficient Giving, formerly known as Open Philanthropy, is a philanthropic funder and advisor whose mission is to help others as much as possible. Since 2014, it has allocated more than $4 billion to support its focus areas, including global health and development, biosecurity, and AI safety and security. 

Professor Florian Kerschbaum has been named a 2026 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his contributions to data security and privacy.

IEEE Fellowships are an elite distinction, and the grade of Fellow is the highest degree of IEEE membership. It is reserved for individuals with outstanding records of accomplishment whose work has advanced engineering, science and technology and delivered significant benefits to society.

Waterloo Blockchain flew 18 students from the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University to South America to compete at ETHGlobal Buenos Aires.

ETHGlobal is one of the largest developer-focused communities in Ethereum. It supports blockchain enthusiasts, regardless of their background, by providing guides, job opportunities, and hackathons. Since 2017, it has hosted more than 40 hackathons across the globe, from Tokyo to Paris to Waterloo.

PhD candidate Muhammad Sulaiman, former postdoctoral researcher Mahdieh Ahmadi, Assistant Research Professor Mohammad Salahuddin, Cheriton School of Computer Science Director Raouf Boutaba, and Aladdin Saleh from Rogers Communications Canada have received the 2025 CNOM Best Paper Award for their research presented at NOMS 2023.

Their paper, Generalizable Resource Scaling of 5G Slices Using Constrained Reinforcement Learning, was published in the proceedings of the 36^th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium.

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Professor Craig S. Kaplan a 2025 Distinguished Member in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the design and modelling of computational geometric patterns and non-photorealistic rendering.

He is among 61 individuals worldwide honoured this year for outstanding scientific achievements in computing.

Aquanty Inc., a Waterloo-based water-modelling company co-founded by Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter Forsyth, has been acquired by Rocscience, a Toronto company specializing in 2- and 3-D modelling software for civil, mining and geotechnical engineers.

Professor Freda Shi and her collaborators Changbing Yang, Franklin Ma and Jian Zhu from the University of British Columbia have received an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2025, the 30^th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Their paper, LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists?, introduced a new benchmark that evaluates how effectively large language models can perform meta-linguistic reasoning.

Professor Ian Goldberg and former Cheriton School of Computer Science doctoral students Aniket Kate and Gregory Zaverucha have received the 2025 Asiacrypt Test-of-Time Award. Their paper, Constant-Size Commitments to Polynomials and Their Applications, was presented originally at Asiacrypt 2010, the 16^th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security.

The Test-of-Time Award honours a paper presented 15 years earlier that has had a significant and lasting impact on the theory and practice of cryptography and information security.

Three Waterloo computer science professors are at the forefront of two new research initiatives that are developing cutting-edge, inclusive, and trustworthy AI systems.

The inaugural research initiatives — Solution Networks — are funded through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIFAR) Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program. In 2024, the federal government launched the CAISI Research Program as part of its AI safety strategy.