News

Professor Jian Zhao has received a 2025 Early Researcher Award, which will provide $100,000 in funding to support his research on enhancing software development through visual interfaces and generative AI. The award is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $150,000 over five years.

This funding will allow him to train the next generation of researchers, by supporting one PhD student, two master’s students, and ten undergraduate research assistants over five years.

Professor Gautam Kamath has been awarded $100,000 by the Ontario Early Researcher Awards program to further his research on algorithms and machine learning techniques that preserve data privacy. The Ministry’s amount is matched by $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $150,000.

This funding will allow him to train the next generation of researchers, by supporting one PhD and two master’s students over five years.

Instead of typing furiously and constantly hitting backspace, what if you could code by just drawing out your ideas?

This vision is becoming a reality thanks to Ryan Yen (MMath ’24), a recent master’s graduate of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, and Professors Jian Zhao and Daniel Vogel. While at Waterloo, Yen co-developed Code Shaping, an AI-powered software that allows programmers to edit their code through free-form sketches. ­

Professor Freda Shi was featured in Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago's (TTIC), alumni highlight series.

Freda Shi, Ph.D. graduate from TTIC’s class of 2024 (advised by Professors Karen Livescu and Kevin Gimpel), joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2024. In September 2024 she was named a CIFAR AI Chair and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.

Freda’s research focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing, aiming to deepen the understanding of both natural language and human language processing. She explores how these insights can enhance the design of more efficient, effective, safe, and trustworthy NLP systems. She is particularly interested in learning language through grounding, computational multilingualism, and related machine learning aspects.

Professor Xiao Hu has received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data for her research on optimizing join-aggregate queries.

Her paper, Output-Optimal Algorithms for Join-Aggregate Queries, addresses a long-standing open problem in database theory, establishing output-optimal bounds on the efficiency with which such queries can be processed.

University Professor M. Tamer Öszu has received the Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, a prestigious recognition conferred annually since 2005 by Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association.

Three childhood friends from the University of Waterloo have secured $500,000 from the Y Combinator (YC) for GALE, an innovative immigration software. 

YC is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious startup accelerators, with an average acceptance rate of one per cent. Every year, recipients receive $500,000 in seed funding and other resources like alumni talks and mentorship. With alumni including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Twitch, YC can help kickstart a young business. 

Peptide identification is a core challenge in proteomics, the study of proteins, their structure and functions. Unlike genomics, which examines an organism’s genetic information, proteomics is far more complex. The proteome — the complete set of proteins produced or modified by a cell or system — varies not only across different cell types but also over time.

DeepSearch, a novel deep learning–based end-to-end database search method developed by PhD student Yonghan Yu and University Professor Ming Li brings new capabilities to protein identification.

Vasisht Duddu is one of 24 recipients internationally and one of two from Canada to receive a 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship. Established in 1951, these competitive graduate fellowships recognize and support outstanding PhD students around the world.

A team of leading cryptography, security, and privacy researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science has been awarded $1.6 million through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Innovation Fund and the Ontario Research Fund.

The project, UPSCOPE: Understanding Privacy, Security, and Cryptography in Online and Physical Environments, aims to develop the algorithms, techniques, tools, and systems to protect our security and privacy in an increasingly interconnected online and physical world.