News

Five incoming graduate students have been awarded Vector Scholarships in Artificial Intelligence (VSAI).

Established in 2017, the Vector Institute supports AI talent, drives research excellence and fosters AI-based innovation in Canada. Its annual VSAI program recognizes top students across Ontario, who are enrolled in Vector-recognized master’s programs and those pursuing individualized AI study paths.

This year’s cohort of 120 scholarship recipients across the province will receive a total of $2.1 million in funding, with each student awarded $17,500.

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PhD student Yuzhe You has won the Michael A.J. Sweeney Award for Best Student Paper at Graphics Interface 2025. Held annually by the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, GI is the nation’s top conference on computer graphics and visualization, and human-computer interaction.

The award recognizes Yuzhe’s paper, Exploring Comparative Visual Approaches for Understanding Model Trade-offs in Adversarial Machine Learning, co-authored with Professor Jian Zhao, her supervisor.

Jiawen Stefanie Zhu (BCS ’24) has won the Best Poster award at Graphics Interface 2025, Canada’s top conference on computer graphics and visualization, and human-computer interaction.

Jiawen completed her undergraduate studies at the Cheriton School of Computer Science in 2024. Now, as a PhD student at the University of Washington, her research focuses on interactive systems that can enhance human–human and human–AI collaboration. In particular, she is “exploring ways to help people navigate our multilingual world.”

Anudeep Das, Vasisht Duddu, Rui Zhang and N. Asokan have received the Best Paper Award at CODASPY 2025, the 15^th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy.

Their paper, Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Models, introduces a new technique to improve the effectiveness, safety and reliability of generative AI systems that create images from natural language text prompts.

Professor Emeritus Douglas Robert Stinson has received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS-Can | Info-Can, the national non-profit organization dedicated to representing computer science and the interests of the discipline across Canada.

Renowned AI researcher Professor Kate Larson has won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Established in 2002, AAMAS is the world’s leading conference for research in AI, autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Every year, it brings researchers and practitioners worldwide to discuss the latest developments in agent technology. This year’s conference took place in Detroit, Michigan, from May 19 to May 23, 2025.

PhD graduate Ludwig Wilhelm Wall (PhD ’24) and his supervisors, Professors Daniel Vogel and Oliver Schneider, have received a Best Paper Honourable Mention Award at the annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

Launched by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI is the leading conference in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and one of the top-ranked conferences in computer science. This year’s conference occurred in Yokohama, Japan, from April 26th to May 1st, 2025.

Computer Science students Hadas Barabash and Leyi Yan have won the 2025 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

As recipients, each receives a $1,000 prize in recognition of outstanding research during their final year of study.

Valentio Iverson, a fourth-year Computer Science major, has won the 2025 Germain-Erdős award, a recognition conferred annually for “remarkable contributions to basic mathematical research” by a student who has done a successful Undergraduate Research Assistant placement.