2019 Cheriton Research Symposium

Friday, September 20, 2019 10:00 am - 4:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science invites you to attend the 2019 Cheriton Research Symposium, held on Friday, September 20, 2019 in the Davis Centre.

This year’s symposium consists of presentations by Cheriton Faculty Fellows, Dan Brown and Urs Hengartner.

Posters by David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship recipients will be on display in Davis Centre Atrium from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Schedule 

Friday, September 20, 2019

Time Event
10:00 a.m.

Mark Giesbrecht, Director, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • DC 1302

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Refreshments will be served

10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Dan Brown, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • DC 1302

Can Computers Write Good Poetry? What Does That Even Mean?

Computers can be programmed to do a variety of tasks, which, if a human had done them, we might identify as creative tasks. But does that mean that they themselves are creative? We examine the state of the art in computer-generated poetry, and examine a variety of ways in which potentially sensible ways of assessing whether a system is creative don't actually work well in practice. Finally, we discuss a few attempts to incorporate advanced aspects of human poetry writing, including editing one’s own work to improve it, into a computational creativity system. 

This work is a joint effort with my PhD student Carolyn Lamb and my colleague Professor Charlie Clarke.

Dan Brown is Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. Dan earned his S.B. degree in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2000. His initial research focus was in analysis of genome sequence data, and he was a researcher on the Human and Mouse Genome Projects at the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research (now the Broad Institute) from 2000 to 2001.  

In recent years, he has studied other kinds of sequential data, such as music scores, lyrics, and poetry, in addition to still finding joy in evolutionary tree reconstruction and DNA sequence analysis.

11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.

Urs Hengartner, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • DC 1302

Breaking Three Defences against Shoulder-Surfing Attacks

Many people use knowledge-based authentication, such as PINs or passwords, on their smartphone. However, these authentication schemes are vulnerable against shoulder-surfing attacks. Tilting the smartphone away from observers is an often used defence against such attacks. Researchers have also proposed alternative defences, such as incorporating an “invisible pressure component” into PIN entry or analyzing keystroke input behaviour during password entry. We have evaluated these defences in user studies. Our conclusion is that the defences provide limited protection. We have also built an open-source augmented reality tool for real-time mimicry guidance on smartphones.

This is joint work with Hassan Khan and Daniel Vogel.

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Lunch in Fishbowl, DC 1301

1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Poster Session • David R. Cheriton ​Graduate Scholarship Recipients

DC Atrium

4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Awards Ceremony

Fishbowl, DC 1301

Gelato will be served — everyone is welcome!

Videos of the symposium presenters

Dan Brown • David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • Can Computers Write Good Poetry? What Does That Even Mean?

Remote video URL

Urs Hengartner • David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • Breaking Three Defences against Shoulder-Surfing Attacks

Remote video URL

Poster session winners

 In total, 23 students participated in the 2019 Cheriton Research Symposium poster competition.

Congratulations to the competition winners!

First-place winner — $300 prize

  • Omar Farhatfor “Watermark aware scheduler for stream processing engines” 

Second-place winners (tie) — $200 prize each

  • Stavros Birmpilisfor “Deterministic reduction of integer nonsingular linear system solving to matrix multiplication”
  • Allen Wang for “Constrained polynomial optimization and application to SPNs”

Third-place winners (tie) — $100 prize each

  • Margaret Foleyfor “Comparing speech recognition and keyboards for phrase composition and transcription on smartphones”
  • Daniel Gabric for “Unbordered conjugates of binary words”

Previous Cheriton Research Symposia