News

John Doucette, soon to begin his PhD at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, has been awarded one of ten Vanier Scholarships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

John will research resource allocation in multi-agent systems. He began his post-secondary education at Dalhousie University at the age of 15. He has also held an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship.

At the June 2012 Convocation, Jacqueline Mok received the Outstanding Service and Leadership Award for her role in the creation of the BigCSters mentoring program. This program pairs senior student mentors with first-year computer science students. Simina Branzei received the Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies Award for her Master's degree, completed under the supervision of Associate Professor, Kate Larson. 

Congratulations to the Waterloo ACM team - students Tyson Andre, Benoit Maurin, and Anton Raichuk with coach Prof. Ondrej Lhotak - on their bronze medal at the 2012 Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals!

The Waterloo Black team (Tyson Andre, Benoit Maurin, Anton Raichuk) finished first in the University of Chicago Invitational Programming Contest. The contest brought together all 22 Canadian and U.S. teams that have qualified for the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest to be held May 14 to 18 in Warsaw, Poland. Waterloo solved 9 problems, beating runners-up Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. Alberta finished 8th, UBC 10th and Toronto 13th.

The 2011 Derick Wood Graduate Scholarship has been awarded to Jakub Truszkowski, a student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science since 2008. Jakub designs fast algorithms for building evolutionary trees from DNA sequences. This problem is one of the oldest computational biology problems, as evolution is the core of modern biology. The two methods that Jakub has developed with his advisor, Professor Dan Brown, focus on speed and on algorithmic simplicity.

Professor Raouf Boutaba has been named a Fellow of the IEEE, "for contributions to automated network and service management methodologies and applications." IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious designation.

Staff who have worked at the University of Waterloo for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 or more years will be recognized at a reception this November. The School congratulates: Daniel Allen, Philippe Beldowski, Caroline Kierstead, Jessica Miranda, Debbie Mustin, Omar Nafees, Suzana Pinto, Wendy Rush, Ian Turner and Michelle Wagler for reaching an anniversary milestone. Collectively, they have worked 150 years at Waterloo.

Fields Institute Workshop on Hybrid Methodologies for Symbolic-Numeric Computation will be held at University of Waterloo on November 16-19 in DC1302. With more than 25 speakers from the numeric and symbolic research communities, this Fields Institute Workshop will focus on the synthesis of symbolic and numeric techniques for algebraic problems and their applications to control theory, industrial modelling, dynamical systems, and other related topics. Registration is free so plan to attend any talk.

Professor Ian Goldberg of the Cheriton School of Computer Science will be awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, at a ceremony in San Francisco this month.