Wednesday, August 6, 2025

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• Enhancing the co-op recruitment experience with changes to cycle management

• New Faculty Teaching Days for spring 2025
• Prof wins FOCI Rising Star Award for advances in censorship-resistant communications
• Wednesday's notes

Enhancing the co-op recruitment experience with changes to cycle management

This article was originally published in the CEE What's New newsletter.

Starting this September, the process for hiring students using WaterlooWorks’ Full Cycle Service job board (jobs that follow our rank/match process) is changing. These changes, driven by feedback from employers, students and staff, aim to streamline recruitment activities and enhance the overall co-op experience for all stakeholders.

Background and rationale

As the home of the top co-op program of its kind and a leader in innovation, the University of Waterloo’s co-op program is always evolving. Although Waterloo offers many pathways for employers to hire top talent, our centralized hiring platform, WaterlooWorks, remains the top choice. Employers hire their top candidate through our Full-Cycle Service job board more than 70 per cent of the time and almost 80% of jobs on the board are filled.

These changes to the hiring cycles for the Full Cycle Service job board on WaterlooWorks stem from detailed analysis and consultation sessions held with co-op employers and students. The feedback highlighted the need for a more flexible and efficient approach to recruitment cycles.  

Employers expressed that the current cycle timing felt rushed, hindering thorough decision-making. Students appreciated the predictability of cycles but requested more time for ranking decisions and expressed concerns about cycles ending too early.

New Faculty Teaching Days for spring 2025

The Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) has announced the dates of the New Faculty Teaching Days Spring 2025 that will run from Tuesday, August 12 to Thursday, August 14 in MC 2036.

The workshops include:

• Who are our Learners, Tuesday, August 12, 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.;
• Course Dynamics and Engagement, Tuesday, August 12, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.;
• Course Design Foundations, Wednesday, August 13, 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.;
• Assessment as Learning, Thursday, August 14, 10:00 a.m. to 12 noon; and
• Course Outline Builder, Thursday, August 14, 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

The August New Faculty Teachings Days allow instructors to complete a variety of workshops that form the core of our New Faculty offerings. Registration is required for any of the five workshops.

If you have questions about the workshop series, please feel free to contact Mary Power.

Prof wins FOCI Rising Star award for advances in censorship-resistant communications

Diogo Barradas is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, a member of the Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Security group, and the Associate Director of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. His research focuses on network security and privacy, with particular emphasis on statistical traffic analysis, Internet censorship circumvention and digital forensics.

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

Professor Diogo Barradas has received the 2025 FOCI Rising Star Award for his significant contributions to censorship-resistant communications. Presented at the Free and Open Communications on the Internet conference, the FOCI Rising Star Award honours early-career researchers whose work advances Internet freedom.

“I am pleased to hear that Diogo has won a FOCI Rising Star Award,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “His research not only develops new censorship-resistant systems, but it also demonstrates how difficult these systems are to detect by censors, complementary work that’s essential to help maintain a free and open Internet.”

While the award acknowledges Professor Barradas’s broader contributions to circumventing Internet censorship, one highlighted achievement is his recent systematization of knowledge paper, research that was presented in July at PETS 2025, the 25^th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.

In “SoK: The Spectre of Surveillance and Censorship in Future Internet Architectures,” Professors Barradas and N. Asokan and their PhD student Michael Wrana present an in-depth analysis of how six leading Future Internet Architecture designs may affect the development and effectiveness of surveillance and censorship mechanisms. They examine packet structure, addressing and naming schemes, and routing protocols to foster discussion on how these new systems may interact with censorship and surveillance apparatuses.

As the Internet has grown, it has enabled widespread access to information, fostering global communication and collaboration. Alongside it, multiple technological advances have allowed network operators to more efficiently and effectively monitor and control the data that flows through their networks. Unfortunately, these same capabilities have empowered state-level actors to deploy large-scale surveillance and censorship mechanisms to monitor people’s Internet activities and restrict their access to online information.

Combating surveillance and censorship is increasingly difficult in part because of the foundational design of the Internet. The original TCP/IP architecture prioritized usability and flexibility over privacy and security, under the assumption that all parties would be trustworthy. Over time, however, the expectation of trust evaporated, requiring security enhancements to be applied retroactively to protect against attacks. Further compounding the problem is the growth of Internet-connected devices and the lack of available Internet protocol addresses.

To address these challenges, researchers have proposed multiple initiatives to overhaul the Internet by applying the lessons learned from 30 years of network engineering experience. Known as Future Internet Architectures, these initiatives seek to remove the limitations of TCP/IP by improving performance, scalability and mobility while accommodating much-needed privacy and security features.

In their systemization of knowledge paper, Professor Barradas and his collaborators explore how these Future Internet Architectures could both help and hinder efforts to preserve online privacy and free access to information. They find that enhanced functionality in intermediate routers and richer packet header fields in prominent Future Internet Architectures may unintentionally help state-level actors deploy fine-grained surveillance and censorship mechanisms. Although Future Internet Architecture proposals incorporate security improvements, they generally do not focus specifically on resisting surveillance or censorship and, moreover, many have not been empirically validated.

The researchers suggest promising directions for continuing research into Future Internet Architecture–based privacy enhancing technologies, and offer guidelines for how best to evaluate these tools and techniques.

To learn more about the highlighted research on which this article is based, please see Michael Wrana, Diogo Barradas, N. Asokan. SoK: The Spectre of Surveillance and Censorship in Future Internet Architectures. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. 2025(2): 494–511.

Wednesday's notes

The University of Waterloo Knowledge Mobilization Community of Practice 2025 Summer Social takes place on Thursday, August 7 from 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Grad House.

"Either bring your lunch or buy your lunch at the Grad House and come and get to know your KMb colleagues at our annual Summer Social," says a note from organizers. "Feel free to stop by to say hi, if you can’t stay for lunch. Please let Nadine Quehl know if you’re planning to join, so we can make sure we have a large enough table."

In accordance with the University's flag-lowering guidelines, flags across campus have been lowered to half-mast in memory of the Honourable Hilary Weston, former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, who passed away on Saturday, August 2. Flags will remain lowered until August 31 until sunrise on August 7.