News

A trio of Waterloo’s top algorithmic programmers showcased their expertise at the 48^th International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, held in Astana, Kazakhstan, from September 15 to 20, 2024. This prestigious global competition attracted elite programming talent from over 140 universities, representing more than 50 countries.

The University of Waterloo has recognized recent PhD graduate Dr. Nils Lukas with the 2024 Alumni Gold Medal for his exceptional academic performance in a doctoral program. This prestigious award, conferred by Alumni Relations, features a custom-crafted, 24-carat gold-plated medal embossed with the university’s seal. Since 1970, the Alumni Gold Medal has been conferred to top graduating students from Waterloo’s six faculties at convocation.

Professor Ihab Ilyas has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest national recognition for researchers in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. He is among 104 distinguished individuals across Canada recognized this year for their exceptional scholarly, artistic, and scientific achievements.

Professor Ihab Ilyas has been awarded the prestigious 2024 C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award in recognition of his contributions to building large-scale machine learning systems for data integration, data cleaning and knowledge construction.

The AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, awarded seven semi-finalist teams $2 million USD each at DEF CON 32, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity conferences.

Among the semi-finalists was 42-b3yond-6ug, a team with students and professors from six universities led by Northwestern University along with the University of Waterloo, University of Utah, University of Colorado Boulder, Johns Hopkins University, and University of New Hampshire.

Professor Gautam Kamath, and his colleagues Professor Florian Tramèr, a computer scientist at ETH Zürich, and Nicholas Carlini, research scientist at Google DeepMind, have won a best paper award at ICML 2024, the 41^st International Conference on Machine Learning, for their paper, “Position: Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining.” 

University of Waterloo Professor Gautam Kamath, along with his colleagues Professor Clément Canonne at the University of Sydney and Thomas Steinke, a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, have been awarded the 2024 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The prestigious recognition was given to the team for their paper, “The Discrete Gaussian for Differential Privacy,” research that was presented initially at NeurIPS 2020 and published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.

A team of software engineering researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR ’24, the 21^st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The prestigious award was conferred for their paper titled “Whodunit: Classifying Code as Human Authored or GPT-4 generated — A Case Study on CodeChef Problems.”

PhD candidate Vasisht Duddu, Intel Labs research scientist Sebastian Szyller, and Professor N.

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.