News

For Kefan Cao, university has been about finding a balance between working hard and having fun.

Cao is this year’s recipient of the Faculty of Mathematics K.D. Fryer Gold Medal, an honour given to a student who exemplifies academic excellence, good citizenship and involvement in extracurricular activities. He graduates this Friday with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree.

A recently released update to the QS subject ranking for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence puts the University of Waterloo second in Canada and 40^th globally.

The results are part of the annual QS World University Rankings by Subject, which rank approximately 1,600 universities in 54 disciplines. Indicators for the subject rankings are drawn from a peer review survey, employer survey, citations data and collaboration data.

A team of theoretical neuroscientists has received the European Neural Network Society Best Paper Award at ICANN 2024, the 33^rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. The prestigious recognition was given for their paper “Biologically-plausible Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling from Vector Symbolic Algebra-encoded Distributions.”

Led by P. Michael Furlong, Research Officer at the NRC-UW Collaboration Centre, along with colleagues Kathryn Simone, Nicole Dumont, Madeleine Bartlett, Terrence Stewart and Professors Jeff Orchard and Chris Eliasmith, the work describes a way that a network of spiking neurons can generate random samples from a probability distribution. The distribution is encoded using vector symbolic algebra, a type of compositional language embedded in a vector space.

An international team of security researchers has received the prestigious 2024 Best Portuguese Internet Research Award from the Portuguese Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC.pt). The researchers were recognized for their paper, “Flow Correlation Attacks on Tor Onion Service Sessions with Sliding Subset Sum,” work that uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the Tor network.

On Friday, September 27, the School of Computer Science held its annual Cheriton Research Symposium, a showcase of research excellence made possible by David R. Cheriton’s generous investment in computer science research. In the afternoon, the School hosted a well-attended poster session featuring the work of 12 graduate students.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Freda Shi and Victor Zhong have been named Canada CIFAR AI Chairs and appointed as Faculty Members at the Vector Institute. They are two of three distinguished researchers in the latest cohort to receive this prestigious national recognition.

A trio of Waterloo’s top algorithmic programmers showcased their expertise at the 48^th International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, held in Astana, Kazakhstan, from September 15 to 20, 2024. This prestigious global competition attracted elite programming talent from over 140 universities, representing more than 50 countries.

The University of Waterloo has recognized recent PhD graduate Dr. Nils Lukas with the 2024 Alumni Gold Medal for his exceptional academic performance in a doctoral program. This prestigious award, conferred by Alumni Relations, features a custom-crafted, 24-carat gold-plated medal embossed with the university’s seal. Since 1970, the Alumni Gold Medal has been conferred to top graduating students from Waterloo’s six faculties at convocation.

Professor Ihab Ilyas has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest national recognition for researchers in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. He is among 104 distinguished individuals across Canada recognized this year for their exceptional scholarly, artistic, and scientific achievements.

Professor Ihab Ilyas has been awarded the prestigious 2024 C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award in recognition of his contributions to building large-scale machine learning systems for data integration, data cleaning and knowledge construction.