CS Professors Awarded $1.1M in NSERC Grants

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Several Waterloo Computer Science professors were recipients of the 2024 Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada's (NSERC) Discovery Program.

This year, the federal government invested $693.8 million to fund R&D and outreach projects in Canada. These initiatives include the Canada Research Chair Program, the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the College and Community Innovation Program, and the PromoScience Program. Their largest initiative, the NSERC Discovery Program, received more than $554 million. Its goal is to support researchers, amplify international collaborations, and attract R&D talent to Canada.

“Canada’s science and research sector is solving some of the world’s greatest challenges, all while driving innovation, growth and productivity,” says The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. “Research programs like Discovery give researchers the flexibility to explore the most promising avenues of research as they emerge to ensure Canada remains a world leader in science and new technologies. Congratulations to all exceptional researchers receiving support, we look forward to learning of your successes.”

Nineteen Cheriton School of Computer Science professors received NSERC grants, amounting to $1,055,131.00.

Name Project Title Funding Amount Grant Type

Sepehr Assadi

Scalable Algorithms for Processing Massive Graphs: Graph Streaming, Communication Games, and Beyond

$81,500

Discovery Grant ($69,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)

Dan Brown

Computational creativity and aesthetics: theory and practice in an age of change

$35,000

Discovery Grant

Peter Buhr

Development, Testing, Launch, Analysis Computer to Frontend Experimental Cluster

$32,631

Discovery Grant

Khuzaima Daudjee

Dynamic Data Systems

$48,000

Discovery Grant

Nancy Day

Discovering and Applying Patterns in Declarative Modelling and Verification

$48,000

Discovery Grant

Yuntian Deng

Multi-Agent Communication and Collaboration for Specialized Large Language Models

$46,500

Discovery Grant ($34,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)

Kate Larson

Supporting Cooperation in Multiagent Systems

$55,000

Discovery Grant

Pengyu Nie

Execution-Guided Machine Learning Models for Test Generation and Maintenance

$37,500

Discovery Grant ($25,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)

M. Tamer Özsu

Disaggregated and Heterogeneous Computing Platform

$150,000

Research Tools and Instruments grants program

Advanced Topics in Graph Data Management and Processing

$48,000

Discovery Grant

Pascal Poupart

Versatile Reinforcement Learning

$48,000

Discovery Grant

Semih Salihoglu

Architectural Principles of Modern Datalog Database Management Systems

$48,000

Discovery Grant

Jeffrey Shallit

Novel Applications of Logic and Automata Theory to Number Theory and Combinatorics on Words

$48,000

Discovery Grant

Freda Shi

Towards General-Purpose Machine Pragmatic Reasoning

$46,500

Discovery Grant ($34,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)

Shlomi Steinberg

Physical Light Transport

$46,500

Discovery Grant ($34,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)

Chengnian Sun

Language-Agnostic Program Reduction for Debugging Language Implementations

$29,000

Discovery Grant

Daniel Vogel

Developing Highly Skilled Dexterous Interactions

$64,000

Discovery Grant

Yaoliang Yu

Taming Deep Generative Models: Faster, Stronger and More Trustworthy

$55,000

Discovery Grant

Hong Zhang

Designing Serving Systems for Large Language Models with Low Latency, High Utilization, and Good Scalability

$41,500

Discovery Grant ($29,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)

Victor Zhong

Teaching machines to learn more efficiently and more generally by reading problem descriptions

$46,500

Discovery Grant ($34,000) & Discovery Launch Supplement ($12,500)