Join us for the 2025 Cheriton Research Symposium, an annual showcase of research excellence made possible through the generous support of David R. Cheriton.

This year’s symposium will feature morning presentations by Professors Shane McIntosh, Toshiya Hachisuka and Craig S. Kaplan, followed in the afternoon by poster presentations by graduate scholars at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.
2025 Cheriton Research Symposium Schedule
Time | Event |
---|---|
10:00 a.m. – 10:05 a.m. |
Raouf Boutaba, Director, Cheriton School of Computer Science | DC 1302 Welcome and Opening Remarks Refreshments will be served |
10:05 a.m. – 10:35 a.m. |
Shane McIntosh, Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow | DC 1302 CI/CD Pipelines Without the Mess Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines process change sets that modify system behaviour by (1) invoking build and test routines, providing timely feedback to team members about whether changes integrate cleanly; (2) updating deployment environments with new system behaviour; and (3) exposing new system behaviour to samples of a user population while monitoring and responding to changes in operational metrics. CI/CD pipelines are composed of software artifacts, and as such, are prone to imperfections, such as noise (e.g., misleading signals from CI/CD) and waste (e.g., invocations of the pipeline that do not provide value). In this talk, I will present research that characterizes and mitigates noise and waste in CI/CD pipelines, and present avenues for future work. Biography: Shane McIntosh (Senior Member, IEEE) is an Associate Professor and the Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow at the University of Waterloo. He leads the Software Repository Excavation and Build Engineering Labs (Software REBELs). Prior to this, he was the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in software build automation and an Assistant Professor at McGill University. In his research, he uses empirical methods to study and improve software build systems, devops pipelines, developer experience platforms, and software quality. |
10:35 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. |
Toshiya Hachisuka, Cheriton Faculty Fellow | DC 1302 Monte Carlo Methods for Partial Differential Equations The core idea of Monte Carlo methods is to use repeated random sampling to obtain a numerical solution to a given problem. A prominent use case is photorealistic image synthesis in computer graphics, where Monte Carlo sampling and integration of light transport paths solve light transport simulation. Recently, my group has revisited the idea of using Monte Carlo methods to numerically solve partial differential equations. The conventional numerical solvers for partial differential equations start with approximating the continuous form of equations into a discrete form to derive numerical solutions out of matrix equations. The Monte Carlo approach fundamentally differs from this conventional approach in that one does not start with a discrete approximation but directly formulates a solution as an average of repeated random evaluations. It also enables us to leverage various Monte Carlo techniques to accelerate the numerical computation of deterministic partial differential equations, which are otherwise considered irrelevant. I will discuss this exciting research direction and demonstrate how the numerical solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, governing fluid dynamics, can be obtained by averaging random evaluations. Biography: Toshiya Hachisuka is an Associate Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His research focuses on the numerical and mathematical aspects of computer graphics. By combining applied mathematics, computer science, and physics, he works on various problems related to the visual simulation of objects. As his work spans several distinct areas, he is a member of three research groups — Computer Graphics, Scientific Computation, and Computational Mathematics. Before joining Waterloo in 2020, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University. He has a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. |
11:05 a.m. – 12:05 p.m. |
Craig S. Kaplan, Marsland Fellow | DC 1302 Aperiodic Tilings and the Einstein Problem A set of shapes is an aperiodic tile set if the shapes admit tilings of the plane, but none with periodic symmetry. Aperiodic tilings were initially conjectured to be impossible in the early 1960s, but the first aperiodic tile sets were found soon after. Mathematicians discovered a sequence of ever smaller sets over a period of about ten years, but progress stalled after Penrose introduced the Kite and Dart, an aperiodic set of size two, in the 1970s. The longstanding question of whether a single shape could tile the plane aperiodically became known as the einstein problem. In 2023 I helped settle the einstein problem in collaboration with Smith, Myers, and Goodman-Strauss: we proved that a shape called the “hat” was an aperiodic monotile. Separately we proved that related shapes called “spectres” could tile aperiodically without reflections. I will talk about the history of aperiodic tilings, including some connections between tilings and computation, and relate the story behind the discovery of hats and spectres. Biography: Craig S. Kaplan is a Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He studies the application of computer graphics and mathematics to problems in art, architecture and design, and is an expert on topics such as Islamic geometric patterns and computational applications of tiling theory. He is a member of the board of the Bridges Organization and helps to run their annual conference on mathematics and art. He is part of the team that discovered the world’s first aperiodic monotiles in 2023. |
12:05 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. |
Lunch | DC 1301 (fishbowl) By invitation |
1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. |
Poster Presentations, Cheriton Graduate Scholars | DC Atrium |
4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. |
Poster Awards Ceremony | DC 1301 |
2025 Cheriton Research Symposium presentations
2025 Cheriton Research Symposium Poster Presenters
Presenter | Supervisor(s) | Poster Title |
---|---|---|
Vahid Reza Asadi | Mohammad Hajiabadi Richard Cleve |
Multi-prover Interactive Proof Systems with Leakage |
Amin Bigdeli | Charles Clarke | Safety and Trustworthiness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Adversarial Attacks |
Anurag Chakraborty | Semih Salihoğlu | Robust Recursive Query Parallelization in Graph Database Management Systems |
Bing Chen | Jeff Orchard | Towards Extrapolative Generation via Disentangled Representation Learning |
Vasisht Duddu | N. Asokan | Unintended Interactions in Protecting ML Models |
Ross Evans | Diogo Barradas | Cache to the Future: Webpage Access in a Blackout |
Cong Ma | Yizhou Zhang | Lexical Effect Handlers: Fast by Design, Correct by Proof |
Shubhankar Mohapatra | Xi He | Computing Inconsistency Measures under Differential Privacy |
Cameron Seth | Eric Blais | Testing Graph Properties with the Container Method |
Janani Sundaresan | Sepehr Assadi | Maximum Matchings in Dynamic Streams |
Sreeharsha Udayashankar | Samer Al-Kiswany | Accelerating Data Deduplication with Content-Defined Skips and Vector Instructions |
Yimu Wang | Krzysztof Czarnecki | LEO-MINI: An Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model using Conditional Token Reduction and Mixture of Multi-Modal Experts |