News

Congratulations to team G-00SE, whose project “Ariadne” won the 2026 Airbus Fly Your Ideas Challenge. The interdisciplinary five-person team consists of Manya Singla (Computer Science); Mahati Tadepalli (Computer Science/Business Administration); Norah Miriam Shibu (Computer Science); Manasa Srivatsan (Geography and Aviation) and Aaisha Pathan (Computer Science).

The annual Fly Your Ideas Challenge is “designed to inspire the next generation to pioneer sustainable aerospace and shape a safer, more connected world.” University students submit proposals to Airbus and then work directly with industry experts to solve real-life challenges.

Computer science PhD student Bella Chen has won $10,000 in seed funding at the Academy of Research Commercialization’s (ARC) inaugural Pitch Day for her technology designed to support neurodivergent children.

This year, the University of Waterloo’s Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business launched ARC, an initiative for PhD students who are interested in commercializing their deep-tech research.

The University of Waterloo is partnering with Cohere, a Canadian-founded artificial intelligence (AI) company and global leader in sovereign AI, to develop new ways for students to learn how to lead AI transformation inside organizations.

Through the partnership, Cohere will support Waterloo’s Future of Work Institute in developing a new AI Transformation and Change Management certificate. The program will equip students with the practical skills needed to help workplaces adopt AI securely, responsibly and in ways that address real operational challenges.

Float, co-founded by former computer science students Griffin Keglevich and Ruslan Nikolaev (BCS ‘20), has closed an $85M CAD all-equity Series C funding.

This round was led by Inovia Capital, with continued participation from Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Garage Capital, and new investment from BDC Capital and Northleaf.

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.