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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.

PhD candidate Joel Wretborn and his colleagues Alexey Stomakhin and Steve Lesser at the New Zealand–based visual effects studio WētāDigital x Unity and Douglas McHale at WētāFX have won an Emerging Technology Award at the 21^st annual Visual Effects Society Awards for their water simulation toolset used in Avata

Some chairs may look futuristic, but a particular chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science is futuristic. It has been custom fitted with sensors, servos, computers and a small projector by a team of human-computer interaction researchers to create an office chair as a platform for personal spatial augmented reality.

From the sepia tones of a Coen brothers film set in the Dust Bowl to a child’s red coat in Schindler’s List, filmmakers have long known the power of colour in movies. Now, computer scientists have analyzed 60 years of movies to paint a picture of the hues used in films.

Using a technique called k-means clustering, researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have analyzed the trailers for more than 29,000 North American movies released between 1960 and 2019.

Four teams of students from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, each with a triad of exceptional coders, competed on Saturday, February 25 at the 2022 East Central North America Regional International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Recent computer science master’s graduate Mahbod Majid has been awarded a 2023 Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award. The prestigious recognition comes with a $5,000 cash prize and is conferred annually to two graduate students in the Faculty of Mathematics who have authored or co-authored an outstanding research paper.

Sepehr Assadi, who is joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Associate Professor in July 2023, is one of 125 recipients of a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University and a member of its Theory of Computing group.