The Cheriton School of Computer Science is named for David R. Cheriton, who earned his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in 1978. In 2005, Professor Cheriton made a transformational gift to the school that supports named chairs, faculty fellowships, and graduate scholarships.
News
Kefan Cao receives 2024 K.D. Fryer Gold Medal, an award conferred for academic excellence and good citizenship
For Kefan Cao, university has been about finding a balance between working hard and having fun.
Cao is this year’s recipient of the Faculty of Mathematics K.D. Fryer Gold Medal, an honour given to a student who exemplifies academic excellence, good citizenship and involvement in extracurricular activities. He graduates this Friday with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree.
Data Science at Waterloo second nationally in QS World Subject Rankings
A recently released update to the QS subject ranking for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence puts the University of Waterloo second in Canada and 40th globally.
The results are part of the annual QS World University Rankings by Subject, which rank approximately 1,600 universities in 54 disciplines. Indicators for the subject rankings are drawn from a peer review survey, employer survey, citations data and collaboration data.
Theoretical neuroscientists receive ENNS Best Paper Award at ICANN 2024
A team of theoretical neuroscientists has received the European Neural Network Society Best Paper Award at ICANN 2024, the 33rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. The prestigious recognition was given for their paper “Biologically-plausible Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling from Vector Symbolic Algebra-encoded Distributions.”
Led by P. Michael Furlong, Research Officer at the NRC-UW Collaboration Centre, along with colleagues Kathryn Simone, Nicole Dumont, Madeleine Bartlett, Terrence Stewart and Professors Jeff Orchard and Chris Eliasmith, the work describes a way that a network of spiking neurons can generate random samples from a probability distribution. The distribution is encoded using vector symbolic algebra, a type of compositional language embedded in a vector space.