News

Postdoctoral researcher Besat Kassaie, Dr. Andrew Kane and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa have won a Best Paper Award at DocEng’25, the 25^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering.

Their paper, Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines, introduces new methods that improve how search engines handle mathematical queries.

Professor Xiao Hu and her collaborators Binyang Dai and Ke Yi from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have received a 2025 SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for their paper, Reservoir Sampling over Joins.

Professor Xiao Hu, and her collaborators have received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data. 

Their paper, Fast Matrix Multiplication Meets the Submodular Width, introduces a new and unified framework for determining how efficiently any Boolean conjunctive query can be answered using fast matrix multiplication techniques.

Professor Xiao Hu has received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data for her research on optimizing join-aggregate queries.

Her paper, Output-Optimal Algorithms for Join-Aggregate Queries, addresses a long-standing open problem in database theory, establishing output-optimal bounds on the efficiency with which such queries can be processed.

University Professor M. Tamer Öszu has received the 2025 Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, a prestigious recognition conferred annually since 2005 by Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association.

Professors Khuzaima Daudjee and Sujaya Maiyya have been awarded $220,000 from the Ontario Research Fund–Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) program. This amount was matched by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI-JELF), bringing total funding to $440,000.

The project, titled Scalable Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Systems, will address foundational challenges in managing and analyzing large-scale data.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in recognition of his significant contributions to question answering and information retrieval.

Established in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL fellowships are conferred annually to members whose contributions to the field have been extraordinary through their scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community, along with broader educational and outreach activities.

A conversation with Professor Xiao Hu, where she discusses her database theory research and its applications to practical database systems, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and what excites her about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Professor Ihab Ilyas has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest national recognition for researchers in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. He is among 104 distinguished individuals across Canada recognized this year for their exceptional scholarly, artistic, and scientific achievements.

Professor Ihab Ilyas has been awarded the prestigious 2024 C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award in recognition of his contributions to building large-scale machine learning systems for data integration, data cleaning and knowledge construction.