News

This fall, the University of Waterloo is welcoming 10 outstanding first-year students — four of whom will be studying computer science — through the Schulich Leader Scholarships program. Awarded annually to 100 high school students across Canada, the Schulich Leader Scholarships are granted to exceptional students who show great entrepreneurial promise in science, technology, engineering and math.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Sepehr Assadi has been named one of three Faculty of Mathematics Research Chairs. Research chairs are conferred to recognize scholarly achievement and pre-eminence in a particular field of knowledge. In addition to the prestigious recognition, research chairs receive $50,000 in research funding and a teaching reduction of one course per year over the three years of the appointment. 

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Gautam Kamath has received a 2023 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award. The $2,500 prize, established in 2017 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Faculty of Mathematics, is conferred to faculty members who have made outstanding research contributions.

Recent master’s graduate Ende Jin, his advisor Professor Yizhou Zhang, and their Harvard colleague Professor Nada Amin have received a Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2023, the 44^th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.

Master’s graduate Lindsey Tulloch and her advisor Professor Ian Goldberg have won one of three Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Awards for “Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution.” Their award-winning paper was presented at PETS 2023, the 23^rd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, held this year from July 10–15 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo, Stony Brook University, and Adobe Research have developed a tool to help people use colour better in graphic design. 

The tool, De-Stijl, uses powerful machine learning technology to suggest intuitive colour palettes for novice designers and inexperienced users. The software combines and improves on the functionalities of existing tools like Figma, Pixlr, and Coolor, allowing users to select important theme colors and quickly visualize how they’ll impact a design.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Peter A. Buhr has won a Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching. Each year, up to two awards are conferred to faculty members who have demonstrated outstanding pedagogical skills and a deep commitment to education of students.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Lap Chi Lau has been appointed a University Research Chair to recognize his many fundamental contributions to theoretical computer science. His research is in the field of algorithm design and analysis, with a focus on algorithms for graph theoretic problems.

Just months ago, an international team of four that includes Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Craig Kaplan discovered a single shape that tiles the plane — an infinite, two-dimensional surface — in a pattern that can never be made to repeat.

The discovery mesmerized mathematicians, tiling enthusiasts and the public alike.

The shape, a 13-sided polygon they called “the hat,” is known to mathematicians as an aperiodic monotile or an “einstein,” the German words that mean “one stone.”

Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have discovered a method of attack that can successfully bypass voice authentication security systems with up to a 99% success rate after only six tries.

Voice authentication — which allows companies to verify the identity of their clients via a supposedly unique voiceprint — has increasingly been used in remote banking, call centres and other security-critical scenarios.