News

On Saturday, October 1, 2022, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Don Cowan (MSc ’61, PhD ’65) received an honorary J.W. Graham Medal in Innovation and Computing at the Wes Graham Symposium.

The award recognizes Professor Cowan’s “extensive academic career, pioneering research in mathematics and computer science, entrepreneurial spirit, and devotion to mentorship and knowledge sharing.”

PhD candidate Ryusuke Sugimoto and Professors Christopher Batty and Toshiya Hachisuka have won a best paper award at SCA 2022. The 21^st ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation took place virtually and in person this year at Durham University in the United Kingdom from September 13 to 15.

We are saddened to announce that our colleague, Professor Fahiem Bacchus, passed away on September 22, 2022. 

Professor Bacchus was a faculty member from 1988 to 1999 at Waterloo’s then Department of Computer Science, after which he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto to assume the position of Professor.

After two years of virtual hackathons, more than 1,000 students returned to the University of Waterloo’s campus for this year’s Hack the North, Canada’s biggest hackathon. The annual event brings together student hackers and innovators at all levels of experience with technology experts and industry leaders from across the nation.

Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have been awarded more than $283k from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to tackle national and global challenges.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Stacey Watson, and their colleagues Manisha Kamarushi, Garreth Tigwell, and Roshan Peiris at Rochester Institute of Technology, have received a best paper award at MobileHCI 2022. Held annually, the ACM International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction will take place virtually and in person in Vancouver this year from September 28 to October 1.

Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in summer 2022. Before coming to the University of Waterloo, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, working with Nate Foster and Rachit Agarwal. She received her PhD in computer science from Princeton, where she was advised by Jennifer Rexford. Mina also has a BSc in computer engineering from the Department of Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology.

For the eleventh year in a row, the University of Waterloo is welcoming ten exceptional first-year students who were awarded a Schulich Leaders Scholarship. Of those who received the prestigious award, six will be studying computer science or software engineering.

A next-generation diabetes monitor that analyzes breath could soon mean no more needle pricks to check blood sugar levels. The device uses gas sensors to measure breath instantly, then using Bluetooth sends data to an app on a mobile device to give a readout.

Distinct biomarkers in exhaled breath carry a subtle chemical signature that the device picks up before the app uses a deep learning algorithm to produce rapid individual results.

Any computer scientist 70 or more years of age today knows almost every other computer scientist of those same ages, as few were in the discipline during its fledgling days. One such individual from that era is Daniel Berry, a professor in the Software Engineering group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.