News

The AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, awarded seven semi-finalist teams $2 million USD each at DEF CON 32, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity conferences.

Among the semi-finalists was 42-b3yond-6ug, a team with students and professors from six universities led by Northwestern University along with the University of Waterloo, University of Utah, University of Colorado Boulder, Johns Hopkins University, and University of New Hampshire.

Professor Gautam Kamath, and his colleagues Professor Florian Tramèr, a computer scientist at ETH Zürich, and Nicholas Carlini, research scientist at Google DeepMind, have won a best paper award at ICML 2024, the 41^st International Conference on Machine Learning, for their paper, “Position: Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining.” 

University of Waterloo Professor Gautam Kamath, along with his colleagues Professor Clément Canonne at the University of Sydney and Thomas Steinke, a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, have been awarded the 2024 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The prestigious recognition was given to the team for their paper, “The Discrete Gaussian for Differential Privacy,” research that was presented initially at NeurIPS 2020 and published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.

A team of software engineering researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR ’24, the 21^st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The prestigious award was conferred for their paper titled “Whodunit: Classifying Code as Human Authored or GPT-4 generated — A Case Study on CodeChef Problems.”

PhD candidate Vasisht Duddu, Intel Labs research scientist Sebastian Szyller, and Professor N.

Seven faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received a 2023 Outstanding Performance Award. Established in 2005, these prestigious awards recognize Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions to research and teaching.

University Professor Ian Munro has been named a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, honouring his more than five decades of scholarly excellence, outstanding pedagogy and dedicated service to the university.

University Professor M. Tamer Özsu has received the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing and significant contributions to the computing field and its scientific community in general, as well as to ACM in particular. He is one of seven individuals recognized for exemplary service to the computing field.

Liam Hebert, a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has been awarded a prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Co-advised by Professors Robin Cohen at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and Lukasz Golab in the Department of Management Science and Engineering (cross-appointed to Computer Science), Liam is one of seven doctoral students at Waterloo to receive this honour. 

A team of systems and networking researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received the 2024 CNOM Test of Time Paper Award for “Dynamic Controller Provisioning in Software Defined Networks,” work that was presented originally at the IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Network and Service Management in 2013.