News

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a Waterloo PhD computer science alumnus, has received the 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award, recognizing his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America.

A Cheriton School of Computer Science–led research team won the Social Impact Award at the 2026 Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI (CUCAI), held in early March.

CUCAI is Canada’s largest undergraduate AI conference. Every year, it connects around 300 students nationwide with industry leaders and innovators to “inspire the future leaders of AI.”

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Matei Zaharia as the recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure, which has enabled large-scale machine learning, analytics, and AI at global scale.

Cameron Seth, a PhD student at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, took home the Totzke Trophy at the University of Waterloo’s 64^th annual Athletic Awards Banquet.

Which of the following might leave a University of Waterloo student trembling in fear?

(A) Sleeping in and missing a midterm

(B) Being at the tail end of the semester and not having a co-op placement yet

(C) Seeing a Canada goose on the way to class

Professor Pascal Poupart has received a $50,000 grant from CIBC to support artificial intelligence research through PhD-level training. The award marks the first research collaboration between CIBC and the University of Waterloo focusing specifically on AI, and reflects the bank’s commitment to growing AI talent in Canada by funding doctoral research.

Titled Representation Learning for Tabular Data with Heterogeneous Feature Types, the CIBC-funded research will support PhD candidate William Loh, who is supervised by Professor Poupart.

In the age of AI, many are concerned about the impacts it could have on career prospects. AI has already automated some tasks, and media reports have specifically discussed the impacts of AI on entry-level jobs in coding.

However, students and alumni at the University of Waterloo are much more optimistic about the future, and the general sentiment is that AI presents opportunities, not threats.

Among the six 2025 Co-op Student of the Year winners is Vinayak Bector, a fourth-year Computer Science Student. While working at xAI as a web developer, he made significant improvements to the company’s codebase and Grok translation pipeline.

A new national initiative to transform access to Canada’s historical records is bringing together researchers across disciplines and institutions, including Professor Dan Brown of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science.

A trio of Cheriton researchers have developed an AI-powered tool that can accelerate software debugging via test automation.

One of the first steps in software debugging is bug reproduction, where a programmer will replicate a bug to understand and decipher its behaviour. They can convert their replication instructions into a bug reproducible test (BRT), a test that fails if the bug is present and passes once it’s gone.