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Two teams of Waterloo Region elementary school students have progressed to the semi-finals in the junior division of the 2023 Technovation Girls Challenge. Technovation Girls is an international 12-week program with regional chapters that equips girls and young women, including transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid individuals ages 10 to 18 with problem-solving, leadership and coding skills to become the next generation of tech entrepreneurs and leaders. 

Waterloo does it again.

Just as a trio of coders had in 2021, a team of three Waterloo algorithmic programmers has topped the competition at the 2023 International Collegiate Programming Contest North America Championship held on May 29, 2023 at the University of Central Florida.

Waterloo overcame the competition, including trios of programmers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Harvard, and the University of Toronto.

Incoming master’s student Jimmy Di has received a 2023–24 Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence from the Vector Institute. These merit-based entrance scholarships provide $17,500 for one year of full-time study and are awarded to top students who have been admitted into an AI-related master’s program in an Ontario university. 

Professor Justin Wan has received the 2023 Arthur Beaumont Distinguished Service Award from CAIMS, the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. Named after its first recipient, the award was established in 1987 to honour Waterloo Applied Mathematics Professor Arthur Beaumont for his many years of service to the society.

Computer science doctoral candidate Johann Wentzel aims to make virtual reality more accessible for disabled people.

“Most of my work is in making VR more accessible for people with motor disabilities or impairments by using the input devices they already have rather than potentially inaccessible VR controllers,” Johann says. 

For example, he looks at how to define meaningful VR experiences for someone who only has access to a button switch and a joystick on their power chair.

Software engineering student Vikram Subramanian has received a 2023 Jessie W. H. Zou Memorial Award. Established by Computer Science Professor Ming Li in honour of his late wife Jessie Wenhui Zou, the $1,000 award is conferred annually to outstanding undergraduate students in the Faculty of Mathematics with the aim of recognizing and celebrating their research accomplishments.

Tiadora Ruza’s journey at the University of Waterloo began long before she started university. The inaugural winner of the Germain-Erdős Award spent many years as a teenager participating in the Math Circles program, a math outreach and enrichment program conducted on campus by the Centre for Education in Math and Computing. Math Circles, Ruza reflects, “allowed me to become familiar with the campus environment and made Waterloo feel like my mathematical home.”

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Robin Cohen has received the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science from CS-Can | Info-Can, the non-profit society dedicated to representing all aspects of computer science and the interests of the discipline across Canada.

Recent PhD graduate Michael Abebe has received the 2023 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award. Now in its fifth year, the award was established to recognize excellence in computer science doctoral research. In addition to the recognition, recipients receive a cash prize of $1,000.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ian Goldberg has been named a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Only 10 per cent of IEEE’s more than 400,000 members receive this designation, an honour conferred to those who have experience reflecting professional maturity, professional practice experience of at least ten years, and significant achievements.