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Professor Gautam Kamath, and his colleagues Professor Florian Tramèr, a computer scientist at ETH Zürich, and Nicholas Carlini, research scientist at Google DeepMind, have won a best paper award at ICML 2024, the 41^st International Conference on Machine Learning, for their paper, “Position: Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining.” 

University of Waterloo Professor Gautam Kamath, along with his colleagues Professor Clément Canonne at the University of Sydney and Thomas Steinke, a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, have been awarded the 2024 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The prestigious recognition was given to the team for their paper, “The Discrete Gaussian for Differential Privacy,” research that was presented initially at NeurIPS 2020 and published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.

William Wang, a third-year undergraduate student, earned one of the top prizes at ETHDenver, held from February 23 to March 3, 2024.

Professor Daniel Vogel at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, Professor Géry Casiez at France’s University of Lille, and researchers Mathieu Nancel and Sylvain Malacria at the Inria centre at the University of Lille, have been funded to create an Associate Team at Inria — France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology.

Janani Sundaresan, a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has been awarded a Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award. Conferred annually to two graduate students who have authored or coauthored an outstanding research paper, the prestigious recognition comes with a prize of $5,000.

Professor Yaoliang Yu has been awarded $100,000 by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Early Researcher Awards program to develop deep generative machine learning models. The Ministry’s amount is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing the total funding to $150,000 to support one PhD, two master’s, and a number of undergraduate students over five years.

Jessica Bohm, a fourth-year Computer Science student, is one of six Waterloo students to receive a 2023 Co-op Student of the Year award.

Professor Raouf Boutaba, Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has received the Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, a recognition conferred annually since 2005 by Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association.

Nomination for the award is based on submissions from former graduate students. In addition to the honour, recipients also receive a $1,000 cash prize.

University Professor M. Tamer Özsu has received the 2024 IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering Education Award for his fundamental contributions to data management and data science pedagogy. One of four prestigious annual awards conferred by IEEE TCDE, the Education Award recognizes database researchers who have made an impact on data engineering education, including impact on the next generation of data engineering practitioners and researchers.

Fahim Ahmed is a computer science and finance student at Waterloo, and the president and co-founder of Waterloo Blockchain. But what feels like a direct path to success now, took him a while to find.

Fahim was only 12 years old when he started crypto-mining.

“I had seen people talking about it a lot online, so I set up my own hardware to do mining in my bedroom,” he recalls. “I just wanted money to buy video games!”