News

A multidisciplinary team of computer science researchers has been awarded $2 million from the Ontario Research Fund–Research Excellence (ORF–RE) program to develop key infrastructure technology for next-generation mobile networks. ORF–RE provides funding to support the costs of major research projects of strategic value to the province.

The project is led by principal investigator Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, with Cheriton co-investigators Professors Martin Karsten, Samer Al-Kiswany and Kate Larson, along with Professor Chui Min Yeum of Waterloo’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Professors Khuzaima Daudjee and Sujaya Maiyya of the Cheriton School of Computer Science have been awarded $220,000 from the Ontario Research Fund–Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) program. This amount was matched by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI-JELF), bringing total funding to $440,000.

The project, titled Scalable Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Systems, will address foundational challenges in managing and analyzing large-scale data.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2024 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in recognition of his significant contributions to question answering and information retrieval.

Established in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL fellowships are conferred annually to members whose contributions to the field have been extraordinary through their scientific and technical excellence, service to the association and the community, along with broader educational and outreach activities.

Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have secured nearly $425,000 in funding to support two research projects through the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC), a federally incorporated not-for-profit organization committed to advancing Canada’s cybersecurity ecosystem.

Professors Sujaya Maiyya and Florian Kerschbaum, members of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, are among those awarded funding in this NCC round, which distributed more than $1.5 million to Waterloo researchers alone.

A conversation with Professor Yuntian Deng, where he discusses his natural language processing and machine learning research, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and his excitement about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

A conversation with Professor Xiao Hu, where she discusses her database theory research and its applications to practical database systems, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and what excites her about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Based on its program and research reputation, the Cheriton School of Computer Science has again been ranked number one in Canada in the 2025 Maclean’s university rankings. This marks the fifth consecutive year that CS at Waterloo has received this prestigious distinction.

A team of theoretical neuroscientists has received the European Neural Network Society Best Paper Award at ICANN 2024, the 33^rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. The prestigious recognition was given for their paper “Biologically-plausible Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling from Vector Symbolic Algebra-encoded Distributions.”

Led by P. Michael Furlong, Research Officer at the NRC-UW Collaboration Centre, along with colleagues Kathryn Simone, Nicole Dumont, Madeleine Bartlett, Terrence Stewart and Professors Jeff Orchard and Chris Eliasmith, the work describes a way that a network of spiking neurons can generate random samples from a probability distribution. The distribution is encoded using vector symbolic algebra, a type of compositional language embedded in a vector space.

On Friday, September 27, the School of Computer Science held its annual Cheriton Research Symposium, a showcase of research excellence made possible by David R. Cheriton’s generous investment in computer science research. In the afternoon, the School hosted a well-attended poster session featuring the work of 12 graduate students.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Freda Shi and Victor Zhong have been named Canada CIFAR AI Chairs and appointed as Faculty Members at the Vector Institute. They are two of three distinguished researchers in the latest cohort to receive this prestigious national recognition.