News

Jeffrey Zang is a first-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo. At 15, he landed his first internship and completed four software internships before his 19^th birthday.  

Since high school, he has competed in 17 hackathons, where he built projects from an eye-tracking device to a conversational robot resembling former President Barack Obama. He became the youngest co-chair of Hack the 6ix, Toronto’s largest hackathon. With his help, the hackathon garnered more than 1,100 attendees and secured nearly $50,000 in sponsorship from companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte. He went on to organize six hackathons.

Recent PhD graduate Negar Arabzadeh has won the Early Career Researcher Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR).  

Negar won the award in SIGIR’s Community Engagement category, which recognizes outstanding professional service in the information retrieval community. The award ceremony took place at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, held in Melbourne, Australia.

Three Cheriton researchers won the Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), a leading cybersecurity and privacy conference.

SACMAT brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss novel approaches for access control, a security measure that determines who can access, use or interact with protected systems. Scanning your badge to enter your workplace or typing your username and password to log in to your Instagram account are examples of access control.

Congratulations to team G-00SE, whose project “Ariadne” won the 2026 Airbus Fly Your Ideas Challenge. The interdisciplinary five-person team consists of Manya Singla (Computer Science); Mahati Tadepalli (Computer Science/Business Administration); Norah Miriam Shibu (Computer Science); Manasa Srivatsan (Geography and Aviation) and Aaisha Pathan (Computer Science).

The annual Fly Your Ideas Challenge is “designed to inspire the next generation to pioneer sustainable aerospace and shape a safer, more connected world.” University students submit proposals to Airbus and then work directly with industry experts to solve real-life challenges.

Computer science PhD student Bella Chen has won $10,000 in seed funding at the Academy of Research Commercialization’s (ARC) inaugural Pitch Day for her technology designed to support neurodivergent children.

This year, the University of Waterloo’s Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business launched ARC, an initiative for PhD students who are interested in commercializing their deep-tech research.

The University of Waterloo is partnering with Cohere, a Canadian-founded artificial intelligence (AI) company and global leader in sovereign AI, to develop new ways for students to learn how to lead AI transformation inside organizations.

Through the partnership, Cohere will support Waterloo’s Future of Work Institute in developing a new AI Transformation and Change Management certificate. The program will equip students with the practical skills needed to help workplaces adopt AI securely, responsibly and in ways that address real operational challenges.

Float, co-founded by former computer science students Griffin Keglevich and Ruslan Nikolaev (BCS ‘20), has closed an $85M CAD all-equity Series C funding.

This round was led by Inovia Capital, with continued participation from Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Garage Capital, and new investment from BDC Capital and Northleaf.

Professor Gautam Kamath and his international collaborators from industry and academia have received the runner-up Caspar Bowden Award at PETS 2026, the 26^th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, held this year in Calgary from July 20 to 25.

Their paper, Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Language Models, demonstrates that advances in natural language processing, parameter efficiency, privacy accounting, and large language models can be combined to enable private fine-tuning of models with performance that approaches that of non-private models.

The prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology (QEII-GSST) has been awarded to seven graduate students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

In 1998, the Ontario government established the QEII-GSST to encourage graduate excellence. Recipients who demonstrate strong academic performance, exceptional research ability or potential, and strong leadership can receive up to $15,000. This amount is funded jointly by the Ontario government and their home university.

Professor Pascal Poupart has been awarded $170,000 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program.

This funding is complemented by $85,000 from industry partner Manulife Financial, bringing the total project support to $255,000. Manulife is also providing significant in-kind contributions, including synthetic data, technical infrastructure for simulated business environments, and access to its technical experts.