News

University of Waterloo students and alumni are changing the game by launching companies with global impact for humanity and our planet. Their remarkable achievements have earned them spots on this year’s illustrious Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.  

The annual list highlights young entrepreneurs who are making a difference in their fields. Waterloo-linked founders were named in artificial intelligence (AI), green tech, education, food and drink and manufacturing categories. 

Nathan Hoel (BCS’ 08) is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ag-tech startup, BinSentry. Founded in 2017, BinSentry creates AI-sensors that can determine a feed bin’s inventory. The data is displayed on a dashboard, providing an accurate snapshot to poultry and hog farmers.

BinSentry has grown exponentially since its humble beginnings in a rented garage in New Hamburg. Now, it operates in a 11,000-square-foot office space in Downtown Kitchener’s Lang Tannery building, which is home to Communitech, one of Canada’s largest innovation hubs. It monitors more than 25,000 feed bins across North America and has entered the Brazilian market. The company continues to grow, as it recently acquired $15 million in Series B funding.

In this Q&A, Hoel discusses BinSentry’s cutting-edge technology, his entrepreneurship journey and love for the city of Waterloo, where he grew up in.

Congratulations to Joshua Duho Kim, who was named one of the ten finalists at the October ETHGlobal Hackathon in San Francisco. Kim, a Computer Science student, was recognized for his solo development of an app that uses the Story blockchain protocol to mint IP licensing terms for digital content.

Kim has competed in several local hackathons in the past and done well – he and a friend got second place at HackWestern in 2021 – but this was his first time at ETHGlobal. He spontaneously decided to go only a day before the competition, buying a plane ticket using Aeroplan points, staying in “the last available bed” at a local youth hostel, and putting together his entire project alone when he couldn’t find a team that shared his interest in the Story protocol.

Victor Zhong joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2024. He also serves as a CIFAR AI Chair and faculty member at the Vector Institute.

His research is at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on using language understanding to learn more generally and efficiently. His research covers a range of topics, including dialogue, code generation, question answering, and grounded reinforcement learning.

Professor Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo has been awarded a new Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Minimizing Human Error in Operating Modern Networks.

In 2000, the federal government launched the CRC Program to position the nation as a global leader in research and development. Every year, it invests $311 million to recruit and retain top talent and to support academic research and training at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Four University of Waterloo teams of algorithmic programmers, each with a triad of coders, ranked within the top 14 at the 2024 ICPC East Central North America contest, held on November 10 at the University of Windsor. Competing against teams from universities across east central North America, Waterloo’s teams placed third, seventh, 10^th and 14^th.

The app is being deployed at Waterloo’s Campus Wellness and 30 clinics across Canada, making support more accessible and affordable 

Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have secured nearly $425,000 in funding to support two research projects through the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC), a federally incorporated not-for-profit organization committed to advancing Canada’s cybersecurity ecosystem.

Professors Sujaya Maiyya and Florian Kerschbaum, members of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, are among those awarded funding in this NCC round, which distributed more than $1.5 million to Waterloo researchers alone.

A conversation with Professor Yuntian Deng, where he discusses his natural language processing and machine learning research, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and his excitement about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

A conversation with Professor Xiao Hu, where she discusses her database theory research and its applications to practical database systems, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and what excites her about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.