News

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Dan Berry and his former PhD student Sri Fatimah Tjong have received the most influential paper award at REFSQ 2023. Also known as the 29^th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, the annual meeting took place this year from April 17–20 in Barcelona, Spain.

A long-term collaboration with academic partners across France has culminated in a memorandum of understanding between the University of Waterloo and Inria — France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Gautam Kamath has been named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Vector Institute Faculty Member in recognition of his contributions to differential privacy, machine learning and statistics. He is among eight outstanding researchers in the latest cohort of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to receive this prestigious national recognition. 

Paul Dirksen, a pioneer computer scientist at the University of Waterloo, passed away on April 8, 2023. He was 83.

Paul was born on November 16, 1939 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to German Mennonite immigrants, and grew up in Waterloo. He was one of the first students at the University of Waterloo, graduating with a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics in 1963 and an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1964. Paul’s professors and mentors Ralph Stanton and Wes Graham encouraged him to pursue a career teaching computer science at Waterloo, leading to a decades-long career.

Hong Zhang joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2023. He develops high-performance, scalable systems for big data and machine learning applications. His research advocates an application-oriented design principle for big data and machine learning systems that fully exploit application-specific structures such as communication patterns, execution dependencies, and machine learning model structures to suit application-specific performance demands. 

Principal investigators Professor Edith Law at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and Professor Hélène Sauzéon at Université de Bordeaux have been funded to create an Associate Team at Inria, France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Inria’s Associate Team program supports bilateral scientific collaborations and promotes and strengthens the institute’s strategic partnerships with leading researchers abroad.

A nearly 60-year-old mathematical problem has finally been solved.

The story began last fall when David Smith, a retired print technician from Yorkshire, England, came upon a shape with a tantalizing property. The life-long tiling enthusiast discovered a 13-sided shape — dubbed the hat — that is able to fill the infinite plane without overlaps or gaps in a pattern that not only never repeats but also never can be made to repeat.

Yang Lu joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor William Noble’s genome sciences group at the University of Washington. He obtained his PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics under the supervision of Professor Fengzhu Sun at the University of Southern California. Before moving to the United States, he completed his MS and BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Computer Science, the University of Waterloo’s top-ranked subject internationally, has risen three spots in the global rankings to the 22^nd position, according to the latest edition of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject released on March 22, 2023.
    
This is the third year in a row that Computer Science was in the top 25 internationally and the top-ranked subject at Waterloo.

PhD candidate Ludwig Wilhelm Wall and two recent Waterloo graduates have built an interactive installation at the intersection of art and technology called The Light Within. Their installation is part of Lumière: The Art of Light, a free outdoor light experience on exhibit at Ontario Place’s Trillium Park from March 10 to May 7.