The Cheriton School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Waterloo annually showcases a handful of outstanding thinkers in the field of computer science, giving them a forum to present their views and ideas to students, faculty, and the interested public.
Watch previous Distinguished Lectures on YouTube
Ion Stoica • November 4, 2024
An AI Stack: From Scaling AI Workloads to LLM Evaluation
Nitin Saxena • June 19, 2024
The Border and its Demystification
Vinton G. Cerf • June 11, 2024
Internet: Past, Present and Future
Adam Smith • April 30, 2024
Privacy, Learning, and Inference
Sanjeev Khanna • April 5, 2024
The Sublinear Lens and the Matching Problem
Earl T. Barr • July 20, 2023
Leveraging Dual Channel Constraints to Speed Program Repair
Sharad Goel • May 9, 2023
Included-variable Bias and Everything but the Kitchen Sink
Tanya Berger-Wolf • April 24, 2023
Imageomics: Images as the Source of Information about Life
Tim Roughgarden • March 1, 2023
The Long Arm of Theoretical Computer Science: A Case Study in Blockchains/Web3
Sheila McIlraith • January 11, 2023
Reward Machines: Formal Languages and Automata for Reinforcement Learning
Pascal Van Hentenryck • November 15, 2022
Fusing AI and Optimization
Tony Chan • June 15, 2022
A Personal and Historical View of Computational Mathematics
Kai Li • May 25, 2022
Machine Learning Meets System Designs: Experience with Designing Learned Cache Systems
Milind Tambe • February 15, 2022
AI for Social Impact: Results from Deployments for Public Health and Conservation
Karl J. Friston • November 4, 2021
Active Inference
Raquel Urtasun • October 7, 2021
An AI-first Approach to Self-driving
Leonard Kleinrock • May 17, 2021
Origins of the Internet
Laurie Williams • April 9, 2021
Solving Software Security Challenges with Artificial Intelligence
Mary Czerwinski • January 14, 2021
Using Technology for Health, Wellbeing and Empathy
Oren Etzioni • November 5, 2020
Semantic Scholar, NLP, and the Fight Against COVID-19
Moshe Vardi • September 24, 2020
An Ethical Crisis in Computing?
Barbara Listkov • June 13, 2019
Multicore Programming
(Barbara Liskov's lecture begins at 6:00 and runs until 42:30)
Shafi Goldwasser • June 13, 2019
Cryptography for Safe Machine Learning
(Shafi Goldwasser's lecture begins at 46:30 and runs until 1:42:25)
Margo Seltzer • May 7, 2019
Systems Research — Construed Broadly
Vitalik Buterin • March 25, 2019
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: Combining Mechanism Design and Computation
Donald Knuth • October 31, 2018
All Questions Answered
Joe Mitchell • May 23, 2018
Fun with Geometric Optimization: Visitation, Visibility, and Variations
Jennifer Widom • March 26, 2018
Magic Moments in Research and Teaching
Jeff Ullman • October 30, 2017
Data Science: Is it Real?
James Demmel • October 12, 2017
Algorithms for Linear Algebra and Beyond
Silvio Micali • June 13, 2017
ALGORAND, A New Public Ledger
Eric Horvitz • April 28, 2017
The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: An Enduring Study on AI and its Influence on People and Society
Eric Horvitz • April 27, 2017
Data, Predictions and Decisions in Support of People and Society
Daniel Alan Spielman • March 23, 2017
The Laplacian Matrices of Graphs: Algorithms and Applications
Ophir Frieder • October 20, 2016
Searching in Harsh Environments
Gail Murphy • October 4, 2016
Human-Centric Software Development Tools
Tony Chan • October 7, 2015
Image Processing and Computational Mathematics
Mike Stonebraker • September 14, 2015
The Land Sharks are on the Squawk Box (How Riding a Bicycle across America and Building Postgres Have a Lot in Common)
Leslie Pack Kaelbling • February 5, 2015
Making Robots Behave
Deborah Estrin • June 23, 2014
Small, n=me, data
Maria Klawe • November 8, 2013
From 10% to 40% Female CS Majors: The Harvey Mudd College Story
Frans Kaashoek • June 11, 2013
The Multicore Evolution and Operating Systems
Jennifer Chayes • November 14, 2012
The Power of Locality for Network Algorithms
Hector Levesque • November 7, 2012
Two Thoughts on the Turing Test
Ed Lazowska • October 13, 2011
Computer Science: Past, Present, and Future
Saul Greenberg • September 21, 2011
Proxemic Interactions: the New Ubicomp
Madhu Sudan • October 14, 2010
Towards Universal Semantic Communication
Eric Brewer • September 17, 2008
Technology Research for Developing Regions
Anne Condon • November 19, 2008
Computational Challenges and Opportunities in RNA Secondary Structure Prediction