News

Professor Freda Shi was featured in Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago's (TTIC), alumni highlight series.

Freda Shi, Ph.D. graduate from TTIC’s class of 2024 (advised by Professors Karen Livescu and Kevin Gimpel), joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2024. In September 2024 she was named a CIFAR AI Chair and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.

Freda’s research focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing, aiming to deepen the understanding of both natural language and human language processing. She explores how these insights can enhance the design of more efficient, effective, safe, and trustworthy NLP systems. She is particularly interested in learning language through grounding, computational multilingualism, and related machine learning aspects.

Seventeen students from the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University dominated ETHDenver, held from February 23 to March 2, 2025.

ETHDenver is the world’s largest and longest-running Ethereum event. Since 2018, it has hosted blockchain-focused events, including panel discussions, workshops, networking sessions, and boot camps. Their main event is #BUIDLathon, a hackathon where attendees can team up to develop their own blockchain projects.

Professor Xiao Hu has received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data for her research on optimizing join-aggregate queries.

Her paper, Output-Optimal Algorithms for Join-Aggregate Queries, addresses a long-standing open problem in database theory, establishing output-optimal bounds on the efficiency with which such queries can be processed.

University Professor M. Tamer Öszu has received the Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, a prestigious recognition conferred annually since 2005 by Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association.

A lot has happened to Kristy Gao (BCS ’22) since graduating from the University of Waterloo, nearly three years ago.

She moved to San Francisco for her first post-graduation job. Started a book club to make friends. Got into an accident, where she, a Canadian, had to navigate the complexities of the American healthcare system. Quit her job to launch a health-tech startup, Cenote, with two people she met from her book club. Applied to Y Combinator (YC), the world’s largest and most competitive startup accelerator. Got accepted by YC and received $500,000 USD in seed funding. 

We connected with our alum about her unique entrepreneurship journey, her passion for diversity, equity and inclusive (DEI) initiatives, and her words to her younger self. 

Peptide identification is a core challenge in proteomics, the study of proteins, their structure and functions. Unlike genomics, which examines an organism’s genetic information, proteomics is far more complex. The proteome — the complete set of proteins produced or modified by a cell or system — varies not only across different cell types but also over time.

DeepSearch, a novel deep learning–based end-to-end database search method developed by PhD student Yonghan Yu and University Professor Ming Li brings new capabilities to protein identification.

Vasisht Duddu is one of 24 recipients internationally and one of two from Canada to receive a 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship. Established in 1951, these competitive graduate fellowships recognize and support outstanding PhD students around the world.

A team of leading cryptography, security, and privacy researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science has been awarded $1.6 million through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Innovation Fund and the Ontario Research Fund.

The project, UPSCOPE: Understanding Privacy, Security, and Cryptography in Online and Physical Environments, aims to develop the algorithms, techniques, tools, and systems to protect our security and privacy in an increasingly interconnected online and physical world.

Interop Labs, the initial developer of the Axelar Web3 interoperability network, announced today a US$1,000,000 donation to grow the Computer Research Endowment at the University of Waterloo.

This generous contribution will support the creation of an AI and blockchain research laboratory at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, the largest and top-ranked academic computer science research centre in Canada. The laboratory will be named the GENESIS Lab, standing for Generative AI for Secure, Interconnected Systems.

Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have elucidated a key piece in the puzzle to detect early invasive skin melanoma. Using computational models of the skin to simulate the complex biophysical changes during early stages of tumour progression, the research holds the potential to improve non-invasive diagnostic methods, particularly in resource-limited regions.