Friday, July 5, 2024

Less highlighting equals to more learning

Photo of Nikhita and Prof Vogel

If you scroll through the average student’s digital textbook or reading, you will probably see multi-coloured streaks scattered everywhere. However, new research reveals that excessive highlighting may do more harm than good.

Computer scientists from Waterloo investigated whether technology controlling the number of words a user can highlight could affect their reading comprehension.

Friday, July 5, 2024

Max Peeperkorn, Dan Brown and colleagues Tom Kouwenhoven and Anna Jordanous receive Best Student Paper Award at ICCC’24

Max Peeperkorn, Tom Kouwenhoven, Dan Brown and Anna Jordanous

PhD candidate Max Peeperkorn, his co-advisors Professors Dan Brown and Anna Jordanous, and fellow PhD candidate Tom Kouwenhoven have received a Best Student Paper Award for their work titled “Is temperature the creativity parameter of large language models?” Their research was presented at the 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity, held in June 2024 at Jönköping University in Sweden.

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

CS-founded startups tackle mental health at Velocity Pitch Competition

Rastin presenting in front of a panel of judges and crowd at the Velocity Semi Finals

“I wish my nighttime self could talk to my daytime self,” says computer science student Josiah Plett as he recounts his experience with insomnia, which began in pre-school. 

 “I spend so much time in my head at night that I didn't feel like the same person in the day. There was a major disconnect between those two parts of my mind. It caused a lot of mental health issues for me growing up, including developing a personality disorder.” 

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Cheriton School of Computer Science researchers awarded ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR 2024

 Jo Atlee, Rungroj Maipradit, Joy Idialu, Noble Saji Mathews, Mei Nagappan

A team of software engineering researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR ’24, the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The prestigious award was conferred for their paper titled “Whodunit: Classifying Code as Human Authored or GPT-4 generated — A Case Study on CodeChef Problems.”

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Seven Cheriton School of Computer Science faculty members receive 2023 Outstanding Performance Awards

composite photo of the 2023 Outstanding Performance Awardees

Seven faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received a 2023 Outstanding Performance Award. Established in 2005, these prestigious awards recognize Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions to research and teaching.

About the awardees

Friday, June 14, 2024

Q&A with Vector AI scholarship winners

Banner photo of scholarship winners. In between each person's face theres a white border/frame

Three incoming computer science master’s students, Benjamin Schneider, Hala Sheta and Xin Yan, have been named recipients of this year’s Vector Institute Scholarships in Artificial Intelligence (VSAI).

Thursday, June 13, 2024

University Professor Ian Munro named Distinguished Professor Emeritus

photo of  Distinguished Professor Emeritus Ian Munro on bench in Waterloo's rock garden

University Professor Ian Munro has been named a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, honouring his more than five decades of scholarly excellence, outstanding pedagogy and dedicated service to the university.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

M. Tamer Özsu receives ACM Presidential Award

photo of M. Tamer Özsu with ACM Books series

University Professor M. Tamer Özsu has received the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing and significant contributions to the computing field and its scientific community in general, as well as to ACM in particular. He is one of seven individuals recognized for exemplary service to the computing field.