News

In one of the most memorable speeches from William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet ponders, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Her message is clear — things are what they are no matter what name they are given. 

But what if your name, or more precisely what people perceive about you from just your name, affected how your contributions are viewed and valued? 

Themelio Labs, a blockchain-based start-up founded by Cheriton School of Computer Science doctoral student Yuhao Dong, has secured $1.5 million USD in seed funding from Polychain Capital, a digital asset investment fund based in San Francisco, California. The start-up is developing Themelio, an open-source public blockchain that aims to revolutionize the way blockchains are used in security-critical software systems.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter Forsyth, Professor Ken Vetzal from the School of Accounting and Finance, and Graham Westmacott, portfolio manager at PWL Capital, have received the 2021 Brockett–Shapiro Actuarial Journal Award from ARIA — the American Risk and Insurance Association. 

With a rich and expansive career in mathematics and computer science, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Don Cowan can be regarded as one of the earliest pioneers of computer science at the University of Waterloo.

Cheriton School of Computer Science PhD student Brad Glasbergen, recent CS undergraduate Fangyu Wu and Professor Khuzaima Daudjee have received the Best Demonstration Award at the 2021 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference for Dendrite, a proof-of-concept system they developed that allows data systems to adapt easily to changes in workload and system behaviour. 

Research conducted by recent CS master’s graduate Iman Akbari has received a Best Student Paper award at SIGMETRICS 2021, the flagship conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group for the computer systems performance evaluation community.

Master’s graduate Abbas Abou Daya, Research Professors Mohammad A. Salahuddin and Noura Limam, and Cheriton School of Computer Science Director Raouf Boutaba have received a CNOM best paper award for their research presented at the 16th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management and published in the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.

Ondřej Lhoták is an Associate Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Waterloo, and an MSc and PhD in computer science from McGill. He joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as faculty in 2006.

Cheriton School of Computer Science faculty members Byron Weber Becker, Eric Blais, Raouf Boutaba, Lori Case, Ihab Ilyas, Anna Lubiw and Pascal Poupart have each received a 2020 Outstanding Performance Award. 

Established in 2005, these awards recognize University of Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions to teaching, scholarship and service.

PhD candidate Shenghao Yang is one of ten recipients nationally to receive a Borealis AI 2020–2021 Fellowship. Now in its fourth year, these $10,000 fellowships are conferred annually to exceptional students pursuing graduate studies in machine learning and artificial intelligence at universities across Canada.