News

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Ihab Ilyas and Gautam Kamath are among the 72 faculty members appointed as 2020 Faculty Affiliates at the Vector Institute. The 2020 cohort includes both new faculty affiliates as well as those returning for a second term.

The Vector Institute’s Faculty Affiliates program brings together professors who conduct research in deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence across universities in Ontario.

On March 17, 2020, Queen’s Park declared a state of emergency under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act to protect the health and safety of individuals and families in Ontario. Among the measures was the cancellation of elective procedures — surgeries scheduled sometimes months in advance — to create capacity for hospitals in case they experienced a massive surge in COVID-19 patients.

Cheriton School of Computer Science PhD candidate Sangho Suh and his colleagues have found a way to use comic strips to teach coding to novice learners.

Coding strips use comics to present programming concepts in a more accessible way. They chose comics because it is a medium well known for its ability to explain complicated concepts and processes effectively through visual storytelling.

With COVID-19 preventing hockey fans from watching games in person this year, the University of Waterloo, Rogers Communications, and Sportsnet are seeking new ways to enhance the experience of watching hockey from home. They recently partnered to host the Sportsnet Hockey Hack, a virtual hackathon that challenged Waterloo students to design applications using 5G technology to deepen and enrich fan engagement.

Partial network partitions are a peculiar type of network fault that disrupts communication between some but not all nodes in a computer cluster. And for what has recently been found to be a surprisingly catastrophic source of computer system failures, partial network partitions have not been studied comprehensively by computer scientists or network administrators.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Shalev Ben-David and Eric Blais have received a prestigious best paper award at FOCS 2020, the 61^st Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. FOCS and its counterpart — the Symposium on Theory of Computing — are the top international meetings in theoretical computer science.

A paper coauthored by Professor and Cheriton Chair N. Asokan has received the 2019 Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Computers by the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board.