News

By Marisa Benjamin, Research Communications Officer, The Games Institute

Motivated by previous research that found that elevator buttons are a huge source of contamination, a new study co-authored by a Cheriton School of Computer Science student presents a touchless elevator concept to slow the spread of COVID-19.

A world-leading University of Waterloo spinoff company, that decodes blood samples for potential treatments for illnesses like cancer and COVID-19, is expanding operations with the help of a $5-million USD investment.

Bin Ma, a University of Waterloo computer science professor who cofounded Rapid Novor in 2015, says the company’s technology is the most advanced in the world when it comes to deciphering the complex workings of antibody proteins, a process called sequencing.

Suppose you’re an archivist, librarian, or historian who’s trying to document and preserve for posterity a narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic or the ongoing Black Lives Matters protests. You’ll naturally be gathering documents from the web, and with tools available today it won’t be difficult to accumulate thousands or even millions of relevant records. How can you make sure that a scholar down the road can actually use the material that you’ve collected?

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Sergey Gorbunov, Gautam Kamath and Jian Zhao have each been awarded a 2020 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Accelerator Supplement.

Cheriton School of Computer Science professors, and graduate and undergraduate students won four awards at ICSE 2020, the 42^nd International Conference on Software Engineering.

Professor Raouf Boutaba will become the eighth Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, a four-year appointment that begins on July 1, 2020.

He brings to this leadership position 21 years of experience at the University of Waterloo that spans excellence in research, teaching, mentorship and service in both the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Faculty of Mathematics.

A new study, led by Apoorva Chauhan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, found that in evaluating the trustworthiness of social media accounts named after crisis events, people sometimes pay attention to the page’s profile picture, name, the number of followers it has, and spelling and grammatical errors.

“Some of these things can be easily spoofed,” said Dr. Chauhan. “People need to think beyond things that can be easily manipulated and look at the authenticity of the source of information.”

Cheriton School of Computer Science PhD students Brad Glasbergen and Michael Abebe, along with Professors Khuzaima Daudjee, Daniel Vogel and Jian Zhao, have received the Best Demonstration Award at the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Conference.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Edward Lank, Kate Larson, Ondřej Lhoták, M. Tamer Özsu, Peter van Beek and Troy Vasiga have each received a 2019 Outstanding Performance Award. Established in 2005, these awards recognize University of Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions in teaching, scholarship and service.

Computer science graduate Jameson Weng has been awarded a Governor General’s Silver Medal, a prestigious national recognition of undergraduate students who have attained the highest academic standing during their degrees.

In Jameson’s case, that distinction was an average of 97 percent across his undergraduate courses.