Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Previous | Next

• United Way spotlight: When food is out of reach

• Waterloo researchers advancing cybersecurity in the age of AI

• Janani Sundaresan awarded 2026 Alumni Gold Medal

United Way spotlight: When food is out of reach

Contributed by United Way Waterloo Region Communities

Access to nutritious food is a fundamental building block for health, learning, dignity, and community well-being. But rising costs are making it harder for individuals and families across Waterloo Region to afford the food they need. 

Today, 23% of households in the region experience food insecurity, and 78% of food-insecure households are above the poverty line. Food insecurity increasingly affects working people. In 2025, more than 37K requests for food supports were identified through the 211 service, with more people unable to get their food needs met than in 2024. 

Local partners are responding. Between January and February 2026, the Cambridge Food Bank supported 6,203 unique individuals and distributed 3,902 emergency food hampers across Cambridge and North Dumfries. For one client, that support means the family avoids "having to decide who eats less" when rent leaves nothing behind. 

Community Support Connections delivered more than 100,000 meals in 2025–2026, helping older adults and people with disabilities stay healthy and independent at home. In schools, Nutrition for Learning reported that as of January 2026, 11% of participating schools offered social food stations or hot food options, while 28% hosted hot breakfast programs. 

United Way supports food hampers, hot meals, fresh and culturally appropriate food, and cooking skills programs, helping neighbours meet a basic need with dignity. 

Contribute to the University of Waterloo’s 2026 campaign today!  Learn more: uwaterloo.ca/united-way

Waterloo researchers advancing cybersecurity in the age of AI

This article was originally featured on Waterloo News.

As Cybersecurity Awareness Month highlights online safety, University of Waterloo researchers are tackling emerging AI security risks

Every day, Canadians trust technology with more of their lives, from banking and health information to workplace communications and smart home devices. Increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) sits behind those interactions.

As AI systems become more capable, there is concern that new security and privacy risks are emerging just as quickly. At the University of Waterloo, researchers are exploring how to protect the next generation of AI-powered technologies from misuse, manipulation and cyberattacks before they reach millions of users. 

"We might not be fully aware that it's everywhere," says Dr. Meng Xu, professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Mathematics and member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI). "Cybersecurity is basically everywhere that's connected to our lives."

As Canada marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Waterloo researchers are investigating some of the newest challenges emerging alongside artificial intelligence. Among them are Xu and fellow professor Dr. Sihang Liu, whose work focuses on identifying vulnerabilities in AI systems before they become widespread problems.

One area of growing concern is AI agents, systems capable of independently completing tasks by combining large language models with external tools and software. While these systems can boost productivity, they also introduce new security risks.

Unlike traditional AI systems, AI agents can take actions on a user's behalf, such as accessing information or interacting with software. That autonomy creates new opportunities for attackers to manipulate their behaviour.

"It really becomes an arms race on how well the defender can use this tool to build secure, more reliable software versus how the attacker can use this tool to find holes and penetrate the system," Xu says.

"How can we make sure this is safe?" Liu says, noting that AI systems can generate outputs at a scale that is difficult for people to review manually.

To help address these challenges, Xu and Liu received support from the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) for research exploring how AI agents can be protected from malicious or compromised tools. The research reflects the broader mission of CPI, where researchers from all six faculties, from computer science and engineering to sociology, law, health and economics collaborate on increasingly complex cybersecurity challenges. Both researchers say CPI’s interdisciplinary approach is one of Waterloo's greatest strengths.

Waterloo is one of Canada's leading cybersecurity hubs because it brings together a unique combination of research excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, industry partnerships and talent development.

According to Xu, Waterloo students demonstrate an unusually strong cybersecurity mindset, reinforced through specialized courses, competitions and co-op experiences.

The University's extensive co-op network also helps students apply security knowledge directly in workplaces and bring real-world challenges back into the classroom. Together with a growing community of faculty and graduate researchers, that creates an ecosystem capable of addressing both today's threats and the ones that will continue to emerge in the future.

Despite the rapid pace of technological change, both researchers remain optimistic. While AI adoption will continue to introduce new security challenges, they believe research, education and better system design will help build safer and more resilient technologies.

"There will definitely be more solutions than problems as the tech continues to change,” Liu says. “These challenges will eventually be solved as we develop more reliable, trustworthy AI systems and build security into their design from the start.”

As that work continues at Waterloo, Xu and Liu are focusing on anticipating tomorrow's risks, training the next generation of cybersecurity leaders and helping ensure that the technologies shaping Canada's future remain secure and trustworthy.

Janani Sundaresan awarded 2026 Alumni Gold Medal

This is an excerpt from an article that was originally featured on the Cheriton School of Computer Science News.

Left to right: Dr. Janani Sundaresan and Professor Sepehr Assadi

Recent PhD graduate Dr. Janani Sundaresan has been awarded Waterloo’s 2026 Alumni Gold Medal in recognition of exceptional academic achievements during her doctoral studies. Conferred by Alumni Relations, the award consists of a 24-karat gold-plated medal embossed with the University of Waterloo’s seal. Since 1970, the Alumni Gold Medal has recognized outstanding graduating students at convocation.

“Janani’s dissertation exemplifies exactly what an excellent thesis in our field should look like,” said Professor Sepehr Assadi, Janani’s PhD supervisor. “It makes foundational advances on longstanding open questions, brings genuine originality in ideas and methods, and demonstrates exceptional technical rigour. Importantly, it also offers a coherent contribution that changes how a research area approaches its central questions, with exposition that makes difficult ideas accessible to others.”

More about Dr. Sundaresan’s PhD dissertation

Dr. Sundaresan’s dissertation confronts a defining question of modern computation: what is fundamentally achievable when data grows so vast that the basic assumptions of classical algorithm design no longer hold? She studied this question through a theoretical lens in two central models for processing massive graphs — graph streaming, where the constraint is the memory of the algorithm, and the CONGEST model of distributed computing, where the constraint is the communication bandwidth. Her work established the minimum resources algorithms require to solve fundamental problems, including the number of passes over the data, computational rounds, memory space and communication costs.

In an era of ever-larger data and ever-faster algorithms, lower bounds identify the barriers that no amount of engineering can overcome. Her results do more than close gaps. They define the true frontier of computation on massive data. Thus, the central contribution of Dr. Sundaresan’s dissertation is a general framework for establishing impossibility results, also known as lower bounds, for several fundamental problems. This framework has led to the resolution of several longstanding open questions in both graph streaming and distributed computing. As an example, her work established the exact number of passes over the input that any small-space algorithm needs for fundamental graph problems such as maximal independent set and maximum matching.

The impact of Dr. Sundaresan’s work is reflected in its publication record. The seven papers forming the foundation of her dissertation have been presented at top theoretical computer science conferences, including the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), and ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), as well as in the Journal of the ACM and the SIAM Journal on Computing. Notably, her STOC 2024, SODA 2025, and FOCS 2025 papers each received invitations to special journal issues, an honour typically reserved for the top 5 to 10 percent of accepted papers.