The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has...
- More than 100 professorial, emeritus and lecturer faculty members
- More than 60 administrative, instructional and technical staff
- More than 4,000 undergraduate students
- More than 400 graduate students
- Been ranked consistently as a top computer science school in Canada and among the best internationally
- Eight Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, seven Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, seven Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, three Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs, two NSERC Industrial Research Chairs, and 17 Ontario Early Researcher Award recipients
- Accepted Waterloo’s youngest graduate student, Erik Demaine, who was just 14 years old when he enrolled to pursue a PhD in computer science. Erik Demaine is now a professor of computer science at MIT.
- Research collaborations with institutions in China, France, Brazil, the United States, and many more nations
- Participated in the annual International Collegiate Programming Contest for more than 25 years — we are the only Canadian institution to ever win the International Collegiate Programming Competition, taking the prized title in 1994 and again in 1999!
Our research spans the field of computer science, from core work on systems and networks, computational theory and programming languages to human-computer interaction and quantum computing to AI and machine learning, to name just a few.
Leaders in computing since the 1960s
The first computer we acquired, an IBM 610, was purchased for student use in 1960.
In 1966, we bought an IBM 360/75 for $3 million more than the cost of the entire MC building. It was the largest and most powerful computer in Canada at the time and was housed in the famous Red Room.
By the 1980s, the University of Waterloo was producing roughly one-third of Canada's computer science graduates.
Some of Waterloo’s developments
Waterloo had a hand in creating both Maple Software and OpenText. Maple Software spawned from a symbolic algebra system created here and OpenText was a spin-off of the project to computerize the Oxford English Dictionary.
Our alumni form the backbone of the local tech economy in Waterloo, and we are extremely proud of the entrepreneurs among them, including the founders of Wish.com and of Maluuba.
Some Academy Award winners are graduates of Waterloo’s Computer Graphics Lab.
