News

The Waterloo Black team composed of Tyson Andre (2A software engineering), Benoit Maurin (mathematics), and Anton Raichuk (Cheriton PhD student) won the ACM East Central North America Regional section of the ACM International Collegiate Programming competition this October. They solved all nine problems of the five-hour contest in just over four hours. Runners-up, the University of Toronto and Carnegie Mellon University, solved eight problems. The Waterloo Gold team placed 5th and Waterloo Red team was 17th.

Kamran Tirdad and Pedram Ghodsnia, in collaboration with Cheriton professors, J. Ian Munro and Alejandro López-Ortiz won the Best Student Paper Award for their paper COCA Filters: Co-Occurrence Aware Bloom Filters at the 18th edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval.

A paper entitled, "An Exploratory Study of the Evolution of Communicated Information about the Execution of Large Software Systems," by Weiyi (Ian) Shang, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan, Michael W. Godfrey, Mohamed Nasser, Parminder Flora, won best paper at the 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering held in Limerick, Ireland this October. "While there are several authors, all but one of them, Adams, have strong Waterloo ties," said Cheriton Professor Michael Godfrey.

Jeremy Clark of the Cheriton School of Computer Science will be in attendance at fall convocation to receive the Doctoral Alumni Gold medal for outstanding academic achievement. "Jeremy's research record, which is both diverse and of very high quality, is astonishing for someone just completing a Ph.D," wrote the School's Director, David Taylor. Professor Urs Hengartner, who supervised Jeremy's work, described him as an enthusiastic researcher with a broad set of interests, covering such diverse topics as cryptography, usability, computational finance, and game theory.

Professor Doug Stinson of the Cheriton School of Computer Science has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest honour bestowed on scholars in arts, humanities and science. Recognized internationally for his research in the fields of cryptography, combinatorics and their interaction, Professor Stinson is the fourth member of the School to be honoured this decade.

University of Waterloo students placed 1st, 2nd, and also received an honourable mention at this year's Games4Girls Competition. For this contest, teams of up to four post-secondary school women create computer games for senior public school or high school girls using the “Game Maker” platform. This PC-based game development tool allows novice designers to create interesting games with basic technical skills, while providing a built-in programming language so more advanced users can customize their game program.

PhD student, Francisco Claude-Faust, has won a Google U.S./Canada PhD Fellowship in Search and Information Retrieval. He was the only Canadian recipient of 34 fellowships given worldwide to young researchers. In addition to his research at the Cheriton School under the direction of Professor Ian Munro, Francisco will be paired with a full-time "Googler" based on shared research interests.

Waterloo Programming team, coached by Cheriton Computer Science Professor Ondrej Lhotak, won a Bronze Medal at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals held this past weekend in Orlando, Florida. The team, comprised of Tyson Andre (1A SE), Brian Bi (1A CS), and Hanson Wang (2A CS), placed 12th overall and 2nd in North America. One hundred and five teams who won their regional contest competed.

CS Professor Don Cowan will be awarded the honorary degree, Doctor of Science, by the University of Guelph at Guelph's June convocation in recognition of his significant contributions to the fields of computer science and software engineering. Professor Cowan was the founding Chairman of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and continues as an active researcher. His work has focused on simplifying access to the development of software systems and their use.