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Paul Dirksen, a pioneer computer scientist at the University of Waterloo, passed away on April 8, 2023. He was 83.

Paul was born on November 16, 1939 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to German Mennonite immigrants, and grew up in Waterloo. He was one of the first students at the University of Waterloo, graduating with a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics in 1963 and an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1964. Paul’s professors and mentors Ralph Stanton and Wes Graham encouraged him to pursue a career teaching computer science at Waterloo, leading to a decades-long career.

Hong Zhang joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2023. He develops high-performance, scalable systems for big data and machine learning applications. His research advocates an application-oriented design principle for big data and machine learning systems that fully exploit application-specific structures such as communication patterns, execution dependencies, and machine learning model structures to suit application-specific performance demands. 

Principal investigators Professor Edith Law at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and Professor Hélène Sauzéon at Université de Bordeaux have been funded to create an Associate Team at Inria, France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Inria’s Associate Team program supports bilateral scientific collaborations and promotes and strengthens the institute’s strategic partnerships with leading researchers abroad.

A nearly 60-year-old mathematical problem has finally been solved.

The story began last fall when David Smith, a retired print technician from Yorkshire, England, came upon a shape with a tantalizing property. The life-long tiling enthusiast discovered a 13-sided shape — dubbed the hat — that is able to fill the infinite plane without overlaps or gaps in a pattern that not only never repeats but also never can be made to repeat.

Yang Lu joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor William Noble’s genome sciences group at the University of Washington. He obtained his PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics under the supervision of Professor Fengzhu Sun at the University of Southern California. Before moving to the United States, he completed his MS and BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Computer Science, the University of Waterloo’s top-ranked subject internationally, has risen three spots in the global rankings to the 22^nd position, according to the latest edition of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject released on March 22, 2023.
    
This is the third year in a row that Computer Science was in the top 25 internationally and the top-ranked subject at Waterloo.

PhD candidate Ludwig Wilhelm Wall and two recent Waterloo graduates have built an interactive installation at the intersection of art and technology called The Light Within. Their installation is part of Lumière: The Art of Light, a free outdoor light experience on exhibit at Ontario Place’s Trillium Park from March 10 to May 7.

PhD candidate Joel Wretborn and his colleagues Alexey Stomakhin and Steve Lesser at the New Zealand–based visual effects studio WētāDigital x Unity and Douglas McHale at WētāFX have won an Emerging Technology Award at the 21^st annual Visual Effects Society Awards for their water simulation toolset used in Avata

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.