David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Recent PhD graduate Nikhita Joshi has won the Governor General’s Gold Medal, one of Canada’s highest academic honours.

To be considered for the University-wide competition, doctoral students must first be selected as the recipient of their faculty’s top doctoral prize. After winning first place in the Faculty of Mathematics’ Doctoral Prize competition, Nikhita was named the faculty’s nominee for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. She is one of three students receiving this honour at Spring Convocation.

PhD candidate Niloy Saha, Research Professor Noura Limam, Postdoctoral Researcher Yang Xiao, and University Professor Raouf Boutaba have received the Best Paper Award at NOMS 2026, the 39^th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, held May 18–22 in Rome, Italy.

Their paper, Rethinking Telemetry Design for Fine-Grained Anomaly Detection in 5G User Planes, introduces a sketch-based telemetry system called Kestrel that was empirically shown to detect quality-of-service anomalies in 5G user planes with 10 per cent greater accuracy than existing selective telemetry schemes while reducing export bandwidth by a factor of 10.

Professor Gautam Kamath and his colleagues, Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra and Alistair Stewart, have been awarded the 2026 Gödel Prize for their landmark paper, Robust Estimators in High-Dimensions without the Computational Intractability.

The Gödel Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science and is widely regarded as the field’s most prestigious honour.