Computer hardware

Mark Aagaard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

His research interests include formal methods for the design and verification of digital-hardware systems. He has developed a formal theory for pipelined circuits based on the conventional ideas of structural hazards, control hazards, data hazards and datapath functionality. Dr. Aagaard’s current research activities use different formalization aspects of pipeline hazards to explore new design and verification techniques for varying classes of hazards.

Some recent projects of Dr. Aagaard’s include verifying data-hazard accuracy, exploiting the power and usability of an off-the-shelf combinational equivalence checker, and developing a prototype design and verification tool that includes a cell library of control components for pipeline stages. Dr. Aagaard also took part in creating the Microbox framework for microprocessor correctness statements, where over 30 published verification results were analyzed and proved correctness statement conditions.

Dr. William (Bill) Bishop is the Director of Admissions for the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo, where he leads the Engineering Admissions Team in the Engineering Undergraduate Office. In this role, he oversees the processing of all applications to undergraduate engineering programs, including transfers into first-year engineering programs.

In addition to his administrative duties, Dr. Bishop is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He teaches undergraduate courses in engineering design, digital design, and embedded systems. His research interests span engineering education, configurable computing, parallel and distributed systems, hardware and software co-design, embedded systems, and multimedia processing.

Dr. Bishop has been recognized for his outstanding contributions to teaching, research, and service. He received the Faculty of Engineering’s Unsung Hero Award in 2024 for his exceptional service. He has earned Outstanding Performance Awards in 2009, 2013, and 2020, and has twice been honored with the James A. Field Teaching Excellence Award in 2006 and 2011. In 2019, he was awarded an Ontario Volunteer Service Award for his 15 years of service with the Waterloo Wellington Science and Engineering Fair.

Dr. Bishop is a member of several professional organizations, including the Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO), the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE), the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is also involved with the IEEE Computer, Aerospace, and Education Societies.

Andrew Boutros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He received his BSc in electronics engineering from the German University in Cairo in 2016, and his MASc and PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto in 2018 and 2024, respectively. His research interests include architecture and CAD tools for reconfigurable computer hardware, and domain-specific acceleration for computationally demanding workloads. During and prior to his PhD, Dr. Boutros spent 4 years as a research scientist at Intel Labs and Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (now Altera) and then led the Toronto office of MangoBoost, a startup developing specialized accelerators for datacenter infrastructure tasks. He has published over 30 papers and won 4 best paper awards in the area of reconfigurable computing.

• Reconfigurable Computing
• Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Architecture
• Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
• Domain-Specific Acceleration

Vincent Gaudet is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

His research interests focus on high-speed and energy-efficient microelectronic circuits applied to digital communication systems and signal processing. He is particularly interested in stochastic computing systems and multiple-valued logic. He has worked on low-density parity-check (LDPC) and turbo decoders, multiple-access channels, implantable neural recording systems, and integrated lab-on-chip instrumentation circuitry.

Dr. Gaudet is currently a Senior Member of the IEEE, and holds many editorial positions. In 2009, he received the Petro Canada Young Innovator Award to recognize and support his work of outstanding young faculty-based research.

Dr. Anwar Hasan is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo and holds the Ripple Chair. He is also a faculty member at Waterloo's Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. From January 2013 to April 2018, Dr. Hasan served as the Associate Dean of Research and External Partnerships for the Faculty of Engineering.

Dr. Hasan's research focuses on cryptographic computations and embedded systems, dependable and secure computing, and security for cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).

He has contributed to numerous books, journal articles, and conference papers and has received several awards recognizing his outstanding achievements in research.

Dr. Nachiket Kapre is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. 

Dr. Nachiket Kapre completed his academic journey at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he first earned a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2005, followed by a Master of Science in Computer Science in 2006. He then went on to complete his Doctorate in Computer Science in 2010. His solid academic foundation and research experience at Caltech have shaped his current work as an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo.

• Digital systems
• Embedded computing systems
• Reconfigurable computing
• FPGA Architecture
• Applications
• Compilers

Dr. Andrew Morton is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He teaches students in the Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Mechatronics Engineering programs, with a focus on digital hardware and real-time systems.

Dr. Morton’s research interests include computer architecture, embedded systems design, real-time scheduling, and applied optimization.

• computer architecture
• embedded systems
• real-time systems
• applied optimization

Dr. Chrystopher Nehaniv is a full professor in the Departments of Systems Design Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, a position he has held since August 2018. A mathematician, computer scientist, and complex adaptive systems researcher, Dr. Nehaniv is also affiliated with the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, where he previously served as Director of the Centre for Computer Science & Informatics Research. There, he led research in the Algorithms, Adaptive Systems, and Wolfson Royal Society Biocomputation Research Groups as a Professor of Mathematical and Evolutionary Computer Sciences.

Before moving to Canada, Dr. Nehaniv was a full professor at the University of Aizu in Japan and held visiting professorships in Mathematics at Ibaraki National University, Japan, and the Institute for Mathematics & Informatics at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He was also a post-doctoral research fellow and lecturer in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Nehaniv is the founder of the Waterloo Algebraic Intelligence & Computation Laboratory (WAICL) and, alongside Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, co-founded the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL). He is a member of the Waterloo AI Institute and serves on the steering committee of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI).

An active contributor to the academic community, Dr. Nehaniv is an Associate Editor for BioSystems, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, Interaction Studies, and Complexity. He previously served as Topic Editor-in-Chief for The International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems in the areas of AI Robotics and Human-Machine/Robot Interaction. He has been involved with the IEEE Task Force for Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems since its inception in 2003, serving as Chair from 2012 to 2018 and as Vice Chair since 2018. He is also a member of the IEEE Cognitive and Developmental Systems Technical Committee (2019-present) of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

Dr. Hiren Patel is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Before joining Waterloo, Dr. Patel was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Edward A. Lee in the Ptolemy group.

Dr. Patel’s research focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation of computer hardware and software. His current areas of interest include real-time embedded systems, computer architecture, hardware architectures for machine learning and artificial intelligence, and security.

Rodolfo Pellizzoni is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

His main research focus is the development of new hardware and software architectures for Cyber-Physical Systems - the next generation of high-performance, safety-critical embedded systems. Due to the requirements imposed by these systems in term of performance, safety and timing predictability; it is a multidisciplinary effort involving embedded system architecture and hardware/software co-design, real-time resource management, timing analysis and operating systems.

In addition to his research work, Dr. Pellizzoni has published over 50 refereed journal articles, refereed conference proceedings, workshop publications and technical reports.

Dr. Manoj Sachdev is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. 

His research interests include low power and high performance digital circuit design, mixed-signal circuit design, and test and manufacturing issues of integrated circuits. He has contributed to over 180 conference and journal publications, and has written 5 books. He also holds more than 30 granted US patents.

Dr. Sachdev, along with his students and colleagues, have received several international research awards.  He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. Dr. Sachdev serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Electronic Testing:  Theory and Applications. He is also  a member of program of IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.

Paul Ward is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is also a faculty fellow at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies.

Professor Ward’s expertise lies in the area of distributed systems and computer networks. In distributed computing, his work focuses on distributed-application management, and more generally on dependable and self-managing distributed systems, with a recent focus on fault detection and diagnosis in Web Services. Professor Ward’s work in networks focuses on raising the abstraction level of the network from one of packet delivery to a service-oriented network, specifically concentrating on problems of service discovery, and the problem of semantic coupling, both of functional and non-functional attributes. He has also studied problems of capacity and fairness in wireless mesh networks and routing in delay-tolerant networks.

Professor Ward co-holds two patents; ‘Brokering Web Mobile Services’ which provides a novel mobile web services discovery method that is capable of fulfilling the requirements from both the clients and providers. His second patent is a ‘Method for Solving Application Failures using Social Collaboration’ in which a computer-implemented method, system and computer usable program code for solving an application failure using social collaboration are provided.

Dr. Seyed Zahedi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture, computer systems, and theoretical computer science.

• computer architecture
• computer systems
• theoretical computer science

Catherine H. Gebotys is an Adjunct Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. 

Her research interests include embedded systems security, side channel analysis for secure devices, security countermeasures for cryptographic algorithms, and countermeasures for hardware hacking – side channel, fault injection, microprobing and reverse engineering. 

Dr. Gebotys is the sole inventor of several patents and has also received numerous awards, including the CITO Champions of Innovation Award. In addition, she has collaborated with several companies including DRDC, XtremeEDA, Blackberry, Motorola, ViXS, and COMDEV. 

Dr. Gebotys has published a number of research papers in the areas of side channel analysis, embedded security, applied optimization for high-level hardware and software synthesis. She is the author of Security in Embedded Devices, as well as the co-author of Optimal VLSI Architectural Synthesis: area, performance and testability.

• Embedded security
• Security countermeasures
• Side channel analysis
• Fault injection analysis
• Photon emissions analysis