Bilal Akhtar, SE2019, is tackling the GTA housing crisis as part of MNTO (More Neighbours Toronto):
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/software-engineering-grad-tackles-housing-crisis
Waterloo won the 2021 ICPC North America Division Championship, and advances to 45th ICPC World Finals. ICPC is the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Waterloo's team includes 4A SE student Wesley Leung, and solved 12 problems in contest. No other competitor solved more than 9 problems.
SE 2021 Capstone Team Hyperbeam (formerly Tutturu) won the $50K Palihapitiya Venture Creation Fund, to help fund their startup. The team consists of SE students Philip Scott, Amby Balaji, Declan Goncalves, and former SE student Keer Liu (now BCS). Hyperbeam is a shared web browser that allows friends to watch videos and surf the web together from different locations. They have over 1 million users, including over 170,000 who are active each month.
SE2016 alumnus Josh Kalpin is part of the volunteer "vaccine hunter" team that has created a Twitter account to inform people of available vaccine appointments. The City of Toronto has partnered with them to disseminate information to the public.
Arbitrium, a startup by SE2022 student Ahmed Hamodi and BCS student Greg Maxin, recently won $5k in the Velocity Concept pitch competition. Arbitrium is a digital end-to-end decision-making platform that allows organizations to make unbiased group decisions about charitable donations that involve multiple stakeholders.
SE 2021 Capstone project Yada (Yet Another Docs App) was one of six projects in the Faculty of Engineering to win the $10k Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Award. Congratulations Aravind Segu, Carl Shen, Shehan Suresh and Akshay Pall!
Waterloo Black, including SE's own Wesley Leung, won first at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) regional competition for East Central North America, competing against 67 teams from Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, University of Toronto, Ohio State, and University of Michigan, along with other universities across Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Congratulations!
WATORACE, including SE's own Kyle Anderson, won 4th place in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) virtual race #3, also capturing the Rising Star Award. The IAC brings together 18 university teams from 11 countries on 4 continents in the world’s first head-to-head, high-speed autonomous race at the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS).
ECE Professor Ladan Tahvildari has been named Chair of the IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering.