Seven faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received a 2023 Outstanding Performance Award. Established in 2005, these prestigious awards recognize Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions to research and teaching.
About the awardees
Sepehr Assadi
Sepehr Assadi is an Associate Professor, a Faculty of Mathematics Research Chair, and a 2023 Sloan Research Fellow.
His research interest is in theoretical computer science and primarily algorithm design and complexity theory for modern models of computation. This includes sublinear algorithms and lower bounds in various models for processing massive datasets such as streaming, distributed, massively parallel, and sublinear time algorithms. He is also interested in graph theory, communication complexity, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.
Christopher Batty
Christopher Batty is an Associate Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where he directs the Computational Motion Group. His research is primarily focused on developing novel physical simulation techniques for applications in computer graphics and computational physics, emphasizing the diverse behaviors of fluids. Elements of his work have been adopted by the visual effects industry, and incorporated into commercial software such as Side Effects’ Houdini and Maya’s Bifrost.
He has served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Graphics and Computer Graphics Forum, as well as program committees for SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and Eurographics among others. Before his academic career, he developed physics-based animation software at former Canadian visual effects studio Frantic Films from 2003–2005, during which time he contributed to water and smoke effects on films like Scooby-Doo 2, Cursed, and Superman Returns.
Raouf Boutaba
University Professor Boutaba is a prolific researcher known internationally for his contributions to automated management, which led directly to the trend toward autonomous networking, and for his work on network virtualization and network softwarization that are revolutionizing the way communication networks are designed, operated and managed.
University Professor Boutaba’s mentorship of graduate students was celebrated recently through a 2024 Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision. Over his career at Waterloo, he has supervised 24 doctoral and 47 master’s students and has advised 17 postdoctoral researchers.
Since joining Waterloo in 1999, he has held various senior academic appointments, including Associate Dean of Research from 2016 to 2019 and Associate Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship from 2019 to 2020, both in the Faculty of Mathematics. Since 2020 he has served as the Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His many awards include being named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Kate Larson
Kate Larson is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where she holds a University Research Chair and the Pasupalak AI Fellowship.
Professor Larson’s research interests are in artificial intelligence with an emphasis on self-interested multiagent systems and how agents interact. The overarching theme of her research is strategic reasoning in computational settings. She is interested in understanding how ideas from game theory, mechanism design and microeconomics can be used to model and design systems for intelligent agents, as well as in studying the effect that computational limitations have on strategic behaviour, with the aim of reconciling some of the conflicts that arise between computational and game-theoretic constraints.
M. Tamer Özsu
University Professor Özsu has received many prestigious awards and international academic acclaim over his career. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is also a Life Fellow of Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is an elected member of the Science Academy, Türkiye, and a member of Sigma Xi.
He received the 2024 ACM Presidential Award, the 2024 IEEE TCDE Education Award, 2022 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award, 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS Can | Info Can, and in 2020 was named a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University. In 2021, he was named a Cheriton Faculty Fellow for the third time.
Pascal Poupart
Pascal Poupart is a Professor, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and a member of the Waterloo Data and AI Institute.
Professor Poupart serves on the advisory board of the AI Institute For Advances in Optimization (2022–present). He served as Research Director and Principal Research Scientist at the Waterloo Borealis AI Research Lab funded by the Royal Bank of Canada (2018–20). He also served as scientific advisor for ProNavigator (2017–19), ElementAI (2017–18) and DialPad (2017–18). His research focuses on the development of algorithms for machine learning with application to natural language processing and material design.
He is best known for his contributions to the development of reinforcement learning algorithms. Notable projects that his research team are working on include Bayesian federated learning, probabilistic deep learning, data efficient reinforcement learning, conversational agents, automated document editing, sport analytics, adaptive satisfiability and CO2 conversion and capture.
Daniel Vogel
Professor Daniel Vogel’s research focuses on fundamental characteristics of human input and novel forms of interaction for current and future computing form factors such as touch, tangibles, mid-air gestures, and whole-body input, for everything from on-body wearable devices and mobile phones to large displays and virtual reality.
Professor Vogel was named a 2023 ACM Distinguished Member for his fundamental contributions to human-computer interaction and applications of novel forms of interaction. He held a Cheriton Faculty Fellowship from 2019–22, was recognized as a 2018 Outstanding Young Computer Scientist by CS-Can | Info-Can, received the 2018 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award, and the 2010 Bill Buxton Best Canadian HCI Dissertation Award.
