News

A multidisciplinary team of computer science researchers has been awarded $2 million from the Ontario Research Fund–Research Excellence (ORF–RE) program to develop key infrastructure technology for next-generation mobile networks. ORF–RE provides funding to support the costs of major research projects of strategic value to the province.

The project is led by principal investigator Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, with Cheriton co-investigators Professors Martin Karsten, Samer Al-Kiswany and Kate Larson, along with Professor Chui Min Yeum of Waterloo’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in recognition of his significant contributions to question answering and information retrieval.

Established in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL fellowships are conferred annually to members whose contributions to the field have been extraordinary through their scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community, along with broader educational and outreach activities.

Victor Zhong joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2024. He also serves as a CIFAR AI Chair and faculty member at the Vector Institute.

His research is at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on using language understanding to learn more generally and efficiently. His research covers a range of topics, including dialogue, code generation, question answering, and grounded reinforcement learning.

Professor Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo has been awarded a new Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Minimizing Human Error in Operating Modern Networks.

In 2000, the federal government launched the CRC Program to position the nation as a global leader in research and development. Every year, it invests $311 million to recruit and retain top talent and to support academic research and training at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Four University of Waterloo teams of algorithmic programmers, each with a triad of coders, ranked within the top 14 at the 2024 ICPC East Central North America contest, held on November 10 at the University of Windsor. Competing against teams from universities across east central North America, Waterloo’s teams placed third, seventh, 10^th and 14^th.

A conversation with Professor Yuntian Deng, where he discusses his natural language processing and machine learning research, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and his excitement about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

A conversation with Professor Xiao Hu, where she discusses her database theory research and its applications to practical database systems, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and what excites her about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Based on its program and research reputation, the Cheriton School of Computer Science has again been ranked number one in Canada in the 2025 Maclean’s university rankings. This marks the fifth consecutive year that CS at Waterloo has received this prestigious distinction.

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.