News

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described the evolutionary relationships between organisms as branches on a tree, a diagrammatic representation of all species that have ever existed connected by common descent.

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species.

As schools moved to a mode of emergency response teaching — ERT — at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effect that remote learning had on students and teachers depended on whether they were in developed or developing countries, a new study shows.

Incoming master’s student Sabrina Mokhtari has received a 2022–23 Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence from the Vector Institute. These merit-based scholarships provide $17,500 for one year of full-time study and are awarded to exceptional students who have been admitted into an AI-related master’s program in an Ontario university. 

Professor Chengnian Sun and his colleagues Yuan Tian and David Lo have received a Most Influential Paper Award at SANER 2022, the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering.

Ryan Goldade has received the 2021 Alain Fournier Dissertation Award for his thesis titled “Efficient liquid animation: New discretizations for spatially adaptive liquid viscosity and reduced-model two-phase bubbles and inviscid liquids.”

In developing countries, people with substance-abuse issues sometimes face shame and can find it difficult to get help. Now, a research team is using machine learning and anonymized data to get a clearer picture of the underlying factors that influence tendencies to abuse drugs and alcohol.

The research provides a rare insight into a somewhat neglected subject because of social and cultural taboos. The research team hopes their work can eventually make it easier for people to get help.

Akshay Ramachandran has received two awards for his doctoral research — the 2022 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award as well as second place in the 2022 Mathematics Doctoral Prize for his thesis titled “Geodesic convex analysis of group scaling for the Paulsen problem and tensor normal model.”

Float, a company that offers corporate credit card and accounting services and was co-founded by Cheriton School of Computer Science alums Griffin Keglevich and Ruslan Nikolaev, has been named among the 2022 C100 Fellows. 

Computer science remains the University of Waterloo’s top-ranked subject internationally, coming in at 25th among the world’s top universities, according to the latest edition of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by subject released on April 6, 2022.

Dr. Mazen Melibari, Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia, has been recognized by MIT Technology Review (Arabic version) as among the 30 most prominent experts in artificial intelligence in the Arab world for the year 2022.

Dr. Melibari obtained his PhD in computer science in 2016 at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Pascal Poupart and Edward Lank.