Tuesday, July 22, 2025

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• Interdisciplinary project on children’s reasoning receives $1.7M in funding
• Aseem Baranwal receives 2025 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award
• Another round of end-of-term concerts coming up
• Brave spaces and starry nights: Tuesday's Notes

 Interdisciplinary project on children’s reasoning receives $1.7M in funding

This article was originally published on the Faculty of Arts news site.

A project led by psychology professor Dr. Stephanie Denison received more than $1.7 million CAD in funding from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF). 

The research will examine the developmental origins of people’s ability to reason about – and act on – multiple uncertain possibilities.

“Children’s ability to consider multiple possibilities is foundational to intellectual humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness — traits essential for lifelong learning and discovery,” said Denison. “In the long term, this research has the potential to inform educational practices and policies aimed at supporting flexible and open-minded thinking in people, thereby promoting a more inquisitive and adaptable society.”

The team combines expertise from four labs at Waterloo, Harvard, UC San Diego, and the University of Copenhagen. The research will integrate neurological, behavioural, and computational approaches to build a more comprehensive picture of the earliest human capacities for open-minded thinking, including environmental factors and individual traits.  

“By using a combination of neurological and behavioural approaches and following children over a 3-year period, we should be able to connect early-emerging implicit understanding (measured via the brain) with later emerging explicit understanding (measured via behavioural experiments),” said Denison.  “And we should be able to examine some potentially early-emerging individual differences in how comfortable people are with uncertainty in general and whether some individual children are more or less able to recognize their own uncertainty.”

The focus on curiosity and critical thinking aligns with TWCF’s strategic priority of understanding and promoting human flourishing.  

Congratulations to Dr. Denison and the team!

Aseem Baranwal receives 2025 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation award

Aseem Baranwal with Professor Fountoulakis at spring 2025 convocation.

This article was originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website. 

PhD graduate Aseem Baranwal has received the 2025 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award. Established in 2019, the annual award recognizes outstanding doctoral research at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and includes a $1,000 prize.

Aseem completed his doctoral studies co-supervised by Professor Kimon Fountoulakis from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and Professor Aukosh Jagannath from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. His thesis, Statistical Foundations for Learning on Graphs, which he defended in October 2024, investigates the theoretical underpinnings of machine learning methods for graph-structured data.

“Congratulations to Aseem on receiving this year’s Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award,” said Professor Fountoulakis. “His thesis makes groundbreaking contributions to the field of graph neural networks and statistical learning on graphs, offering novel solutions with provable guarantees.”

“This is a well-deserved recognition,” Professor Jagannath added. “Aseem’s work introduces novel theoretical frameworks that deepen our understanding of graph neural network performance. His research offers fundamental insights into the optimality of message-passing architectures and is supported by rigorous empirical validation.”

Innovations and novel contributions

Aseem’s thesis explores how machine learning models can better interpret and classify data structured as a graph. His work focuses on graph neural networks — or GNNs — a class of models that integrate both node features and relational structures to make predictions. His research makes several novel contributions.

It develops a statistical framework to understand node classification in feature-rich relational data, offering a rigorous foundation for understanding the generalization performance and robustness to noise of GNNs compared with architectures that do not use relational information.

It introduces a notion of asymptotic local Bayes optimality for node classification, enabling the design of optimal GNN architectures for sparse relational data, a property that is often satisfied in practice.

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of the effects of graph convolutions, identifying fundamental classification thresholds and optimal placement of graph convolutions in multi-layer networks.

Finally, Aseem’s thesis is the first to theoretically analyze the performance of graph attention neural networks, which are among the most popular architectures used for machine learning on graphs. His research provides a mathematically precise characterization of graph attention mechanisms and their limitations in distinguishing intra- and inter-class edges, advancing understanding of GNN performance.

Impact on the research community

Aseem’s research addresses several key challenges in GNN research, including oversmoothing, generalization error, and message-passing optimality, offering novel solutions with provable guarantees. His findings have been presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, leading machine learning venues. His research has helped establish a new trend in understanding the performance of GNNs using statistical tools, work that has since been cited by leading researchers across multiple disciplines.

The code for all experiments is open-sourced and available on GitHub.

About the Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award

Aseem Baranwal is the eighth doctoral graduate to receive a Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award. Previous recipients are Amine Mhedhbi (2024), Michael Abebe (2023), Akshay Ramachandran (2022), Mike Schaekermann (2021, tie), Hong Zhou (2021, tie), Fiodar Kazhamiaka (2020), and Md Faizul Bari (2019).

  Another round of end-of-term concerts coming up

The Music department will be hosting ensemble end-of-term concerts this Sunday.

The Jazz Ensemble will perform Spring Forward, Fall Back on Sunday, July 27. Directed by Michael Wood, the Jazz Ensemble will be playing a selection of fun pieces and more mournful tunes enjoyable for all ages.

The concert takes place at 2:00 p.m. in the Great Hall of Conrad Grebel University College (Room 1111). Admission is free, and a reception will follow the concert.

A highlight of every term is the Instrumental Chamber Ensembles concert on Sunday, July 27 at 7:30 p.m.

“Please join us for some beautiful classical music, performed by six different student groups playing a diverse range of instruments,” says a note from the music department. “Music featured this term includes Fuch’s Seven Fantasiestucke for violin, viola, and piano, as well as Scharwenka’s Trio in e minor. The chamber ensembles are directed by violist Judith Davenport.

The concert will be held in the Conrad Grebel University College. Admission is free.

Brave spaces and starry nights: Tuesday's Notes

Why do we avoid difficult conversations—and what happens when we do? Find out by attending Brave Spaces Conversations: A Care-Centered Approach to Navigating Difficult Dialogues Through an EDI-R Lens, taking place Wednesday, July 23, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.Brave Space Conversations is a 90-minute, equity-rooted workshop designed to help individuals and teams move beyond silence and into meaningful dialogue. This session combines emotional insight, practical tools, and evidence-based strategies to help participants show up with confidence and compassion, even when the conversation is hard.

Also happening tomorrow: All members of the Waterloo community are invited to the Indigenous Constellation Star Gazing Event from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Space is limited to 40 participants — registration is required.

The Department of Applied Mathematics will be hosting Professor Rémi Abgrall for a Distinguished Lecture entitled, Virtual finite element and hyperbolic problems: the PAMPA algorithm on Thursday, July 24, 2025, from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in MC 5501. Professor Rémi Abgrall is a renowned applied mathematician, recognized for his significant contributions to computational fluid dynamics, the numerical analysis of conservation laws, multiphase flows, and Hamilton–Jacobi equations. 

Information Systems & Technology (IST) has published the latest in the Atlassian blog series entitled Coming Soon: A New Look and Navigation Experience in Atlassian Products.