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Ever spent hours browsing through multiple websites because you can’t find the right source for your essay?

Fortunately, a Waterloo-led research team has created ScholarCopilot, an AI-powered software that can make writing papers faster, smoother, and less stressful.

Users can write or upload on ScholarCopilot’s interface. When they click on the “search citations” button, it will analyze their content and generate a list of academic sources. If the user chooses one of the recommendations, ScholarCopilot will automatically create in-text citations.

PhD student Yuzhe You has won the Michael A.J. Sweeney Award for Best Student Paper at Graphics Interface 2025. Held annually by the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, GI is the nation’s top conference on computer graphics and visualization, and human-computer interaction.

The award recognizes Yuzhe’s paper, Exploring Comparative Visual Approaches for Understanding Model Trade-offs in Adversarial Machine Learning, co-authored with Professor Jian Zhao, her supervisor.

Jiawen Stefanie Zhu (BCS ’24) has won the Best Poster award at Graphics Interface 2025, Canada’s top conference on computer graphics and visualization, and human-computer interaction.

Jiawen completed her undergraduate studies at the Cheriton School of Computer Science in 2024. Now, as a PhD student at the University of Washington, her research focuses on interactive systems that can enhance human–human and human–AI collaboration. In particular, she is “exploring ways to help people navigate our multilingual world.”

Anudeep Das, Vasisht Duddu, Rui Zhang and N. Asokan have received the Best Paper Award at CODASPY 2025, the 15^th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy.

Their paper, Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Models, introduces a new technique to improve the effectiveness, safety and reliability of generative AI systems that create images from natural language text prompts.

Professor Emeritus Douglas Robert Stinson has received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS-Can | Info-Can, the national non-profit organization dedicated to representing computer science and the interests of the discipline across Canada.

Valentio Iverson, a fourth-year Computer Science major, has won the 2025 Germain-Erdős award, a recognition conferred annually for “remarkable contributions to basic mathematical research” by a student who has done a successful Undergraduate Research Assistant placement.

Coming from a family of teachers, Norwegian exchange student Christian Garmann Sørli has long been interested in using technology to support human intelligence.

Through the International Work-Integrated-Learning in Artificial Intelligence (IWIL AI) program, a joint initiative between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University of Waterloo, Christian is leveraging AI to enhance and accelerate student learning.

Professor Sepehr Assadi and his international collaborators — Soheil Behnezhad, Sayan Bhattacharya, Martín Costa, Shay Solomon and Tianyi Zhang — have received a Best Paper Award at STOC 2025, the 57^th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.

Professor Jian Zhao has received an Ontario Early Researcher Award, which will provide $140,000 in funding to support his research on enhancing software development through visual interfaces and generative AI. 

The funding from the Ontario government is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $190,000 over five years.

Professor Gautam Kamath has been awarded $140,000 from the Ontario Early Researcher Awards program to further his research on algorithms and machine learning techniques that preserve data privacy. 

The amount from the Ontario government is matched by $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $190,000.