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On Saturday, July 6, nearly two hundred students gathered for an ask-me-anything event with Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain and a former University of Waterloo student.

Buterin studied computer science at Waterloo and worked as a research assistant for cryptographer and computer science professor Ian Goldberg. In 2013 he wrote a white paper proposing Ethereum. Buterin was awarded a $100,000 USD grant from the Thiel Fellowship in 2014 and subsequently left Waterloo to work on Ethereum full-time. Today, Ethereum is second only to Bitcoin in market value.

Several Waterloo Computer Science professors were recipients of the 2024 Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada's (NSERC) Discovery Program.

This year, the federal government invested $693.8 million to fund R&D and outreach projects in Canada. These initiatives include the Canada Research Chair Program, the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the College and Community Innovation Program, and the PromoScience Program.

If you scroll through the average student’s digital textbook or reading, you will probably see multi-coloured streaks scattered everywhere. However, new research reveals that excessive highlighting may do more harm than good.

Computer scientists from Waterloo investigated whether technology controlling the number of words a user can highlight could affect their reading comprehension.

PhD candidate Max Peeperkorn, his co-advisors Professors Dan Brown and Anna Jordanous, and fellow PhD candidate Tom Kouwenhoven have received a Best Student Paper Award for their work titled “Is temperature the creativity parameter of large language models?” Their research was presented at the 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity, held in June 2024 at Jönköping University in Sweden.

“I wish my nighttime self could talk to my daytime self,” says computer science student Josiah Plett as he recounts his experience with insomnia, which began in pre-school. 

 “I spend so much time in my head at night that I didn't feel like the same person in the day. There was a major disconnect between those two parts of my mind. It caused a lot of mental health issues for me growing up, including developing a personality disorder.” 

Damien Masson (PhD ‘23) has received two prestigious dissertation awards: the Prix de thèse L'Association Francophone de l'Interaction Humain-Machine (AFIHM) and the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society’s (CHCCS) Bill Buxton Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). 

A team of software engineering researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR ’24, the 21^st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The prestigious award was conferred for their paper titled “Whodunit: Classifying Code as Human Authored or GPT-4 generated — A Case Study on CodeChef Problems.”

PhD candidate Vasisht Duddu, Intel Labs research scientist Sebastian Szyller, and Professor N.

Seven faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received a 2023 Outstanding Performance Award. Established in 2005, these prestigious awards recognize Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions to research and teaching.

Three incoming computer science master’s students, Benjamin Schneider, Hala Sheta and Xin Yan, have been named recipients of this year’s Vector Institute Scholarships in Artificial Intelligence (VSAI).