Cheriton School of Computer Science faculty members Robin Cohen, Khuzaima Daudjee, Ian Goldberg, Jesse Hoey, Florian Kerschbaum, Jimmy Lin, Victoria Sakhnini and Dave Tompkins have each received a 2021 Outstanding Performance Award.
Established in 2005, these prestigious awards recognize University of Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions.
“Congratulations to Robin, Khuzaima, Ian, Jesse, Florian, Jimmy, Victoria and Dave,” said Professor Raouf Boutaba, Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Their many research, teaching and service contributions to the University of Waterloo generally and to the School of Computer Science in particular have been truly exceptional.”
L to R top: Robin Cohen, Khuzaima Daudjee, Ian Goldberg and Jesse Hoey
L to R bottom: Florian Kerschbaum, Jimmy Lin, Victoria Sakhnini and Dave Tompkins
About the recipients
Robin Cohen is a Professor in the Artificial Intelligence group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. She received Waterloo’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2019, the first recipient from Computer Science since 1978 and the first-ever female recipient from the Faculty of Mathematics. Two notable areas of focus within her research agenda of recent years have been efforts to mentor a large group of undergraduate research assistants in the area of multiagent trust modelling and her significant involvement serving on the program committees of AI conferences that are forward-looking: imagining blue sky ideas for the future and examining research at the intersection of AI and society.
Khuzaima Daudjee conducts systems-oriented research. He works at the intersection of distributed systems and data management, with emphasis on building large-scale systems, storage and infrastructure in the cloud, and on modern hardware. He is a member of both the Data Systems Group and the Systems and Networking Group. Khuzaima and his graduate and undergraduate students have received two ACM SIGMOD Best Demo Awards. Other awards include a Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, and his students receiving the Governor General’s Gold Medal — the top-level university-wide award — and Facebook Emerging Scholar Award.
Ian Goldberg is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, a founding member of its Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) group, and a member of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. His research interests are in security and privacy, specifically in creating privacy enhancing technologies for the Internet. In 2019, Professor Goldberg was named the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he discovered serious vulnerabilities in several widely deployed security systems, including those used by cellular phones and wireless networks. He also studied systems for protecting the privacy of Internet users, which led to his role as Chief Scientist at Zero-Knowledge Systems, a Montreal-based start-up, before joining the University of Waterloo as faculty in 2006.
Professor Goldberg received the 2018 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies for his research that examined ways to lower the cost of private information retrieval, a task that is typically computationally costly and notoriously difficult to scale. In 2019, he won the 2019 USENIX Security Test of Time Award for his research that introduced a fundamental technique for confining untrusted applications in computer systems.
Professor Goldberg is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a recipient of the Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award from CS-Can | Info-Can and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award.
Jesse Hoey is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where he leads CHIL — the Computational Health Informatics Laboratory. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute and an affiliate scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.
Professor Hoey holds a PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia and has published more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers.
His primary research interest is to understand the nature of human emotional intelligence by attempting to build computational models of some of its core functions, and to apply them in domains with social and economic impact. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and an Area Chair for the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022).
Florian Kerschbaum is Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science effectively July 1, 2022, a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy group, and the NSERC/RBC Industrial Research Chair in Data Security. Before joining the University of Waterloo, he worked as chief research expert at SAP in Karlsruhe from 2005 to 2016.
Professor Kerschbaum was the inaugural director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, a position he held from 2018 to 2021. In 2019, he was named an ACM Distinguished Member and, in 2020, he received an Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award from CS-Can | Info-Can. His research interests are in security and privacy across the data science lifecycle. He extends real-world systems with cryptographic security mechanisms to achieve provable security guarantees.
Jimmy Lin is a Professor, a Cheriton Chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, and a member of the Data Systems Group. In June 2021, he became a co-director of the Waterloo AI Institute, with the goal to lead its expansion to encompass research in data science and artificial intelligence. His research aims to build tools that help users make sense of large amounts of data. He works at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and databases, with a focus on large-scale distributed algorithms and infrastructure for data analytics.
Professor Lin serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Primal, a Waterloo-based synthetic semantic data company focused on creating meaning computers can understand. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of RSVP, a Waterloo-based start-up that builds deep natural language understanding technologies to facilitate seamless dialogues between users and systems.
Professor Lin and his coauthors, Rodrigo Nogueira and Andrew Yates, recently published a book titled “Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond,” a text that provides a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area.
Victoria Sakhnini is the Associate Director of Software Engineering and the primary advisor for SE students. As part of this role, she promotes gender equity for those interested in SE and CS. Victoria is also a continuing lecturer in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, primarily teaching first and second-year CS courses and Software Requirements Specification and Analysis course that is directly related to her research interest. She is also the course maintainer of CS137 and SE101 and helped develop the course content and additional resources for students’ support.
Dave Tompkins is a continuing Lecturer at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He currently serves as the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies. Previously, he was the chair of the Commons Committee for six years and he was the course coordinator for CS 136 for nine years. Dave is a strong advocate for academic integrity and investigates numerous integrity cases for the Assistant Dean of Students office.