News

We are saddened to announce that Robert Angus “Gus” German — one of the original “WATFOR kids” — passed away on March 12, 2022 at age 79.

Gus is remembered by friends and colleagues in the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Faculty of Mathematics as one of the pioneers who helped establish the university’s reputation as a leader in computer science in the 1960s.

Professor Jo Atlee, Director of Women in Computer Science, has received the 2022 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award, an honour bestowed for her sustained and outstanding service to the software engineering community and for enabling an equitable, diverse and inclusive research environment in software engineering worldwide.

PhD candidate Greg Philbrick has been awarded a Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award. The prestigious recognition comes with a cash prize of $5,000 and is conferred annually to a master’s or PhD student who has authored or co-authored an outstanding research paper.

Three teams of students from the Cheriton School of Computer Science, each with a triad of exceptional coders, competed on Saturday, February 26 at the 2021 East Central North America Regional International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Team Waterloo Gold, consisting of Chris Trevisan (CS 1B), Pang Wen Yuen (CS 2B) and Marian Dietz (a CS Master’s student), came in third, solving 11 of 13 algorithmic coding problems. 

The Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at the University of Waterloo is among a select few organizations involved in CSIN — Canada’s new Cyber Security Innovation Network.

Cheryl Lao, a master’s student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, is one of 16 recipients across North America and one of four from Canada to receive a 2022 Adobe Research Women-in-Technology Scholarship. As a recipient of this prestigious award, she will receive $10,000 USD for education expenses and a year-long Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

Axelar, a decentralized network that connects application builders with blockchain ecosystems, applications and users, has successfully completed a $35 million USD Series B funding round, bringing its market valuation to $1 billion USD.

Fabrice Matulic is a senior researcher at Preferred Networks, Inc., a technology company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. He is also a former postdoctoral researcher in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where he worked in the field of human–computer interaction.

Jeremy Hartmann successfully defended his dissertation in December 2021 and launched an entrepreneurial venture that took his academic research to the next level.

The biosphere, the zone in which life on Earth is found, contains an estimated 10 million multicellular species. But perhaps the most surprising fact about life on Earth is how little we know about its diversity. Only 2 million species are known to science — organisms that have been studied in sufficient detail to at least be described, classified and given a scientific name. With at least another 8 million species yet to be discovered, cataloguing the diversity of life is in many ways a moonshot — a vast endeavour that succeeds by bringing together specialists across many disciplines.