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Last week, students at the University of Waterloo were invited to participate in the GOODHack24 challenge. This event was held at Communitech in downtown Kitchener and was co-hosted by the City of Kitchener, Go Open Data (GOOD) and GreenHouse, a social incubator at United College.

This hackathon challenge offered a space for students to brainstorm, explore and develop innovative solutions at the intersection of open data, technology and local sustainable resources to support affected communities experiencing heat inequity.  

Jason Amri, a fourth-year Computer Science student, was featured in two episodes of the Global Futures podcast.

“I decided to do mathematics out of defiance,” Marian Forster says, chuckling and leaning forward in her chair. “I pretty much got a message from society, my school, and my family that I was not very smart, and that I should take typing in Grade 10 and become a typist like my mother. And then that would be it.”

If Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh lived in the 2020s how different would their art be? Would they use any computer science principles just like students taking CS 383: Computational Digital Art Studio?

“It won’t get any bigger than this,” says River Stanley, a fourth-year University of Waterloo student in the Computer Science program, as they reminisce about the story they uncovered with three fellow undergraduates that would go on to make national and international headlines. 

Eight current and former David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science students received $2.5M in funding from one of the world's biggest and most prestigious startup accelerators, the Y Combinator (YC).

Two Computer Science students won the Jessie W. H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

This award was created by Computer Science Professor Ming Li and his family to honour his late wife Jessie Wenhui Zou. It recognizes excellence in undergraduate research and is valued at $1000.

Eight Waterloo researchers have received $25,000 each from the Graham Seed Fund (GSF) to support transformative health-tech collaborations. Among the recipients is Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Edith Law.

Growing up in a family where money was scarce, Floyd Marinescu (BMath ’02) saw firsthand the impacts of working class poverty. “Money was a source of a lot of conflict in my house,” he said. “I knew that if there was financial security, it would have been a lot better for my family.” 

A fan of Star Trek, Marinescu yearned for the egalitarian, poverty-less society depicted on the show, often wondering, “How do we get to that future?”  

A team of researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, along with their colleagues at Western University, have successfully classified 191 previously unidentified astroviruses using a new machine learning-enabled classification process.