News

PhD graduate Ludwig Wilhelm Wall (PhD ’24) and his supervisors, Professors Daniel Vogel and Oliver Schneider, have received a Best Paper Honourable Mention Award at the annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

Launched by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI is the leading conference in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and one of the top-ranked conferences in computer science. This year’s conference occurred in Yokohama, Japan, from April 26th to May 1st, 2025.

Computer Science students Hadas Barabash and Leyi Yan have won the 2025 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

As recipients, each receives a $1,000 prize in recognition of outstanding research during their final year of study.

Valentio Iverson, a fourth-year Computer Science major, has won the 2025 Germain-Erdős award, a recognition conferred annually for “remarkable contributions to basic mathematical research” by a student who has done a successful Undergraduate Research Assistant placement.

Professor Robin Cohen has received the 2024 Excellence in Online Teaching Award, an honour conferred by Waterloo’s Centre for Extended Learning.

Coming from a family of teachers, Norwegian exchange student Christian Garmann Sørli has long been interested in using technology to support human intelligence.

Through the International Work-Integrated-Learning in Artificial Intelligence (IWIL AI) program, a joint initiative between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University of Waterloo, Christian is leveraging AI to enhance and accelerate student learning.

Professor Sepehr Assadi and his international collaborators — Soheil Behnezhad, Sayan Bhattacharya, Martín Costa, Shay Solomon and Tianyi Zhang — have received a Best Paper Award at STOC 2025, the 57^th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.

Professor Jian Zhao has received an Ontario Early Researcher Award, which will provide $140,000 in funding to support his research on enhancing software development through visual interfaces and generative AI. 

The funding from the Ontario government is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $190,000 over five years.

Professor Gautam Kamath has been awarded $140,000 from the Ontario Early Researcher Awards program to further his research on algorithms and machine learning techniques that preserve data privacy. 

The amount from the Ontario government is matched by $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $190,000.

Researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and Microsoft Research have created a method that makes virtual reality more accessible to people with mobility limitations.

Professor Xiao Hu, and her collaborators have received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data. 

Their paper, Fast Matrix Multiplication Meets the Submodular Width, introduces a new and unified framework for determining how efficiently any Boolean conjunctive query can be answered using fast matrix multiplication techniques.