News

Professor Yaoliang Yu has been awarded $100,000 by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Early Researcher Awards program to develop deep generative machine learning models. The Ministry’s amount is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing the total funding to $150,000 to support one PhD, two master’s, and a number of undergraduate students over five years.

Jessica Bohm, a fourth-year Computer Science student, is one of six Waterloo students to receive a 2023 Co-op Student of the Year award.

Professor Raouf Boutaba, Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has received the Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, a recognition conferred annually since 2005 by Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association.

Nomination for the award is based on submissions from former graduate students. In addition to the honour, recipients also receive a $1,000 cash prize.

University Professor M. Tamer Özsu has received the 2024 IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering Education Award for his fundamental contributions to data management and data science pedagogy. One of four prestigious annual awards conferred by IEEE TCDE, the Education Award recognizes database researchers who have made an impact on data engineering education, including impact on the next generation of data engineering practitioners and researchers.

Fahim Ahmed is a computer science and finance student at Waterloo, and the president and co-founder of Waterloo Blockchain. But what feels like a direct path to success now, took him a while to find.

Fahim was only 12 years old when he started crypto-mining.

“I had seen people talking about it a lot online, so I set up my own hardware to do mining in my bedroom,” he recalls. “I just wanted money to buy video games!”

Pengyu Nie obtained his PhD in 2023 and MSc in 2020 from The University of Texas at Austin, where he was advised by Milos Gligoric. He has a BSc from University of Science and Technology of China, which he received in 2017.

Friday, March 8, 2024 marks International Women’s Day, a global holiday recognizing gender-related issues and honouring female achievements. To celebrate, the Cheriton School of Computer Science is highlighting five female students and faculty who paved significant research breakthroughs this past year.  

If you have trouble figuring out if an image of a person is real or if it’s been generated using artificial intelligence, you’re not alone.

A new study conducted by Cheriton School of Computer Science researchers found that people had more difficulty than expected distinguishing who is a real person and who is artificially generated.

The study saw 260 participants provided with 20 unlabeled pictures: 10 of which were of real people obtained from Google searches, and the other 10 generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, two commonly used AI programs that generate images.

Edith Law is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where she co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Her research delves into social computing technology, machine intelligence interactions, and the design and user experience of technology that upholds important human values.

Professor Law explains how we can harness the power of new technologies ethically for the betterment of humanity.

Opinion by Professor Law

Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, an estimated 230,000 people are diagnosed with the disease every year.  

University Professor Ming Li, the Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics, is using deep learning technology to make personalized cancer vaccines accessible to everyone. He began doing cancer research when his wife, Jessie W. H. Zou, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she died in 2010, her legacy continues in his research.