2025 Cheriton Research Symposium

Friday, September 26, 2025 10:00 am - 4:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

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

a collage of images from the Cheriton Research Symposium

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