David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Nathan Hoel (BCS’ 08) is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ag-tech startup, BinSentry. Founded in 2017, BinSentry creates AI-sensors that can determine a feed bin’s inventory. The data is displayed on a dashboard, providing an accurate snapshot to poultry and hog farmers.

BinSentry has grown exponentially since its humble beginnings in a rented garage in New Hamburg. Now, it operates in a 11,000-square-foot office space in Downtown Kitchener’s Lang Tannery building, which is home to Communitech, one of Canada’s largest innovation hubs. It monitors more than 25,000 feed bins across North America and has entered the Brazilian market. The company continues to grow, as it recently acquired $15 million in Series B funding.

In this Q&A, Hoel discusses BinSentry’s cutting-edge technology, his entrepreneurship journey and love for the city of Waterloo, where he grew up in.

Congratulations to Joshua Duho Kim, who was named one of the ten finalists at the October ETHGlobal Hackathon in San Francisco. Kim, a Computer Science student, was recognized for his solo development of an app that uses the Story blockchain protocol to mint IP licensing terms for digital content.

Kim has competed in several local hackathons in the past and done well – he and a friend got second place at HackWestern in 2021 – but this was his first time at ETHGlobal. He spontaneously decided to go only a day before the competition, buying a plane ticket using Aeroplan points, staying in “the last available bed” at a local youth hostel, and putting together his entire project alone when he couldn’t find a team that shared his interest in the Story protocol.

Victor Zhong joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2024. He also serves as a CIFAR AI Chair and faculty member at the Vector Institute.

His research is at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on using language understanding to learn more generally and efficiently. His research covers a range of topics, including dialogue, code generation, question answering, and grounded reinforcement learning.