News

Professor Gautam Kamath and his international collaborators from industry and academia have received the runner-up Caspar Bowden Award at PETS 2026, the 26^th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, held this year in Calgary from July 20 to 25.

Their paper, Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Language Models, demonstrates that advances in natural language processing, parameter efficiency, privacy accounting, and large language models can be combined to enable private fine-tuning of models with performance that approaches that of non-private models.

The prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology (QEII-GSST) has been awarded to seven graduate students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

In 1998, the Ontario government established the QEII-GSST to encourage graduate excellence. Recipients who demonstrate strong academic performance, exceptional research ability or potential, and strong leadership can receive up to $15,000. This amount is funded jointly by the Ontario government and their home university.

Professor Pascal Poupart has been awarded $170,000 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program.

This funding is complemented by $85,000 from industry partner Manulife Financial, bringing the total project support to $255,000. Manulife is also providing significant in-kind contributions, including synthetic data, technical infrastructure for simulated business environments, and access to its technical experts.

Six students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received Ontario Graduate Scholarships (OGS).  

For more than 50 years, the Ontario government has awarded the OGS to exceptional graduate students who demonstrate academic excellence, strong research ability and potential, and exceptional leadership. Recipients can receive up to $15,000, funded jointly by the provincial government and their home university.

In spring 2026, Professor Dan Brown appeared before the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss intellectual property and safety concerns raised by the rise of generative AI.

He highlighted concerns about the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI systems and the potential impact of these technologies on creative professionals, particularly writers and creators from minoritized communities.

In an age of search engines, online databases, and AI assistants, it is easy to forget that for most of modern history research was done using books, paper, and pencils.

If you have ever looked up a definition or searched the etymology of a word online instead of driving to the library, you have the Waterloo innovators behind the New Oxford English Dictionary Project to thank.

Twenty-one researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have secured a combined $1,331,500 in funding through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

This year, NSERC is investing $630 million to foster discovery research, training and talent development in Canada. The funding will empower researchers to tackle pressing problems and strengthen Canada’s position as a global innovation hub.

Rising distributed systems researcher Ahmed Alquraan has received the 2026 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Since 2019, this annual award recognizes outstanding doctoral research at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and includes a $1,000 prize.

Two Waterloo Region high school student teams are celebrating landmark achievements in the 2026 Technovation Girls competition.

For the first time in the Waterloo chapter’s history, a team has advanced to the Technovation Girls World Summit, while another team has been recognized as the second-ranked intermediate-level team in North America.

Professor Dave Tompkins has received the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching. Each year, the Faculty presents one or two awards to instructors who have demonstrated outstanding teaching skills and a deep commitment to student education. The prestigious award includes a public citation and a cash prize.