Current students

Bahareh Sarrafzadeh, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Email triage involves going through unhandled emails and deciding what to do with them. This familiar process can become increasingly challenging as the number of unhandled email grows. During a triage session, users commonly defer handling emails that they cannot immediately deal with to later. These deferred emails, are often related to tasks that are postponed until the user has more time or the right information to deal with them. 

Eitan Grinspun, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Columbia University

Blockbuster films depend on computational physics. The focus is on models that capture the qualitative, characteristic behavior of a mechanical system. Visual effects employ mathematical and computational models of hair, fur, skin, cloth, fire, granular media, and liquids. This is scientific computing with a twist. But techniques developed originally for film can also advance consumer products, biomedical research, and basic physical understanding.

Xiao-Ping Zhang, Department of Electrical, Computer & Biomedical Engineering
Ryerson University

Eunsol Choi, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science
University of Washington

Real world entities such as people, organizations and countries play a critical role in text. Reading offers rich explicit and implicit information about these entities, such as the categories they belong to, relationships they have with other entities, and events they participate in. 

Pedro Velmovitsky, Public Health and Health Systems
University of Waterloo

Yashar Ganjali, Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto

John Wittnebel, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

In this thesis, we study lower bounds on maximum matchings in 1-planar graphs. We expand upon the tools used for proofs of matching bounds in other classes of graphs as well as some original ideas in order to find these bounds. The first novel results we provide are lower bounds of maximum matching in 1-planar graphs as a function of their minimum degree.

Jose Serna, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Dan Wolczuk, Faculty of Mathematics
University of Waterloo

In educational psychology, the curse of knowledge refers to the phenomenon that individuals inherently assume that the people they are communicating with have the same knowledge and thought processes as they do. 

In this seminar, we will discuss how the curse of knowledge can affect both instructors and students, and we will look at some strategies that instructors can use to try to counteract this and improve student learning.