Did you know?
The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has...
- More than 90 faculty members
- More than 50 administrative, instructional and technical staff
- More than 3,600 undergraduate students
- More than 400 graduate students
- Been cited consistently as a top computer science school in Canada and among the best internationally
- Six Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, five ACM Fellows, three IEEE Fellows, two Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs, 14 Ontario Early Researcher Award winners
- Graduated the youngest graduate student, Erik Demaine, who was just over 14 years old when he enrolled at Waterloo and is now a professor of computer science at MIT
- Research collaborations with institutions in China, France, Brazil, the United States, and many more.
- Participated in the annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for more than 25 years, having brought home a medal 17 times and having won the contest in 1994 and 1999
Our research spans the field of computer science, from core work on systems, theory and programming languages to human-computer interaction, DNA and quantum computing to theoretical and applied machine learning, just to name a few.
Our researchers improve the realism of computer animations, improve privacy and security on the Internet, show how the structure of social networks influences voting behaviour, and elucidate through mathematical models why veins are blue — and that’s just a sampling of our recent discoveries and scientific contributions.
Think about this...
The first computer we acquired, an IBM 610, was purchased for student use in 1960.
In 1966, we purchased 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.
In the 1980s, the University of Waterloo was producing roughly one-third of Canada's computer science graduates.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, any student who could demonstrate crashing the computer system was treated to a drink for exposing a weakness. To future students: this policy is no longer valid.
The pink tie originated as one of Ralph Stanton's eccentric habits. It is speculated that the founder of the Math Faculty merely did his laundry in the runoff from a red roof after a friend accidentally dyed his undergarments a similar colour while staying there.
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 here in Waterloo, and we are extremely proud of the entrepreneurs among them, including the founders of Wish.com and of Maluuba, a deep-learning and AI–technology start-up that was sold to Microsoft.
Some Academy Award winners are graduates of Waterloo's Computer Graphics Lab. This is the same lab that has created a computer brush model that learns to mimic the style of its user.
Amazing accomplishments
Tony Lai
Mr. Lai is the youngest graduate student of the University. He was 14 years old when he entered Waterloo. He turned 18 when he successfully defended his thesis, "Efficient Maintenance of Binary Search Trees," in 1990 — the same age as the average first-year student.
Marceli Wein
Marceli Wein, adjunct professor of computer science, won an Academy Award in 1997 shared with Nestor Burtnyk for their work on computer assisted key framing for character animation. A demonstration of this technique can be found below.
