News

Some chairs may look futuristic, but a particular chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science is futuristic. It has been custom fitted with sensors, servos, computers and a small projector by a team of human-computer interaction researchers to create an office chair as a platform for personal spatial augmented reality.

From the sepia tones of a Coen brothers film set in the Dust Bowl to a child’s red coat in Schindler’s List, filmmakers have long known the power of colour in movies. Now, computer scientists have analyzed 60 years of movies to paint a picture of the hues used in films.

Using a technique called k-means clustering, researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have analyzed the trailers for more than 29,000 North American movies released between 1960 and 2019.

Four teams of students from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, each with a triad of exceptional coders, competed on Saturday, February 25 at the 2022 East Central North America Regional International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Recent computer science master’s graduate Mahbod Majid has been awarded a 2023 Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award. The prestigious recognition comes with a $5,000 cash prize and is conferred annually to two graduate students in the Faculty of Mathematics who have authored or co-authored an outstanding research paper.

Sepehr Assadi, who is joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Associate Professor in July 2023, is one of 125 recipients of a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University and a member of its Theory of Computing group.

Master’s candidate Niki Hasrati and Professor Shai Ben-David have received the best paper award at ALT 2023, the 34^th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory. This year, the annual meeting that explores the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of machine learning will take place in Singapore from February 20 to 23.

When Sarah Wilson graduated high school a year early and started in the Computer Science program at Waterloo, there were big expectations. As a high school student, Sarah was elected as a student trustee for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board, served as chair of the Ontario Student Voice Awards with the Ontario Student Trustee Association, and volunteered in several community roles.

Cheriton students Jeremy Chen, Yuqing Huang and Mushi Wang and Professors Semih Salihoğlu and Ken Salem have received a 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for their paper “Accurate summary-based cardinality estimation through the lens of cardinality estimation graphs.” No stranger to scholarly recognition, this research earlier received the Best Experiment, Analysis and Benchmark Award at VLDB 2022, the 48^th International Conference on Very Large Databases, where it was presented originally.

Computer Science alumnus and start-up founder Ian MacKinnon is visiting campus for an “Ask Me Anything” session on Monday, January 23, 2023 at 4:30 p.m., kicking off the first in a new Entrepreneurship and Impact Series from the Math Innovation Office.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2022 ACM Fellow for his contributions to question answering, information retrieval, and natural language processing.