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Recent computer science master’s graduate Mahbod Majid has been awarded a 2023 Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award. The prestigious recognition comes with a $5,000 cash prize and is conferred annually to two graduate students in the Faculty of Mathematics who have authored or co-authored an outstanding research paper.

Sepehr Assadi, who is joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Associate Professor in July 2023, is one of 125 recipients of a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University and a member of its Theory of Computing group.

Master’s candidate Niki Hasrati and Professor Shai Ben-David have received the best paper award at ALT 2023, the 34^th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory. This year, the annual meeting that explores the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of machine learning will take place in Singapore from February 20 to 23.

When Sarah Wilson graduated high school a year early and started in the Computer Science program at Waterloo, there were big expectations. As a high school student, Sarah was elected as a student trustee for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board, served as chair of the Ontario Student Voice Awards with the Ontario Student Trustee Association, and volunteered in several community roles.

Cheriton students Jeremy Chen, Yuqing Huang and Mushi Wang and Professors Semih Salihoğlu and Ken Salem have received a 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for their paper “Accurate summary-based cardinality estimation through the lens of cardinality estimation graphs.” No stranger to scholarly recognition, this research earlier received the Best Experiment, Analysis and Benchmark Award at VLDB 2022, the 48^th International Conference on Very Large Databases, where it was presented originally.

Computer Science alumnus and start-up founder Ian MacKinnon is visiting campus for an “Ask Me Anything” session on Monday, January 23, 2023 at 4:30 p.m., kicking off the first in a new Entrepreneurship and Impact Series from the Math Innovation Office.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2022 ACM Fellow for his contributions to question answering, information retrieval, and natural language processing.

• The project will focus on secure and reliable end-to-end network slicing for 5G mobile and beyond networks in collaboration with leading Canadian companies including BlackBerry, Rockport Networks, and NoviFlow
• BlackBerry to develop novel technologies to support Zero Trust approach to software supply chain
• Rockport scale fabrics to support AI at the edge for safety-critical autonomous systems
• NoviFlow high-performance SDN network operating software to support the deployment of the multi-access edge cloud

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Khuzaima Daudjee a Distinguished Member for his outstanding scientific contributions to computing.

“On behalf of ACM and the Distinguished Member Committee, I am delighted that you are among the inductees honored with this designation and congratulate you on this well-deserved recognition,” wrote Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Chair of the ACM Distinguished Member Committee, in her letter to Professor Daudjee.

The following is a condensed article by Rose Simone; see original at https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/fall-2022/feature/cybersecurity-builders

Penelope Schankula (BCS in progress) is a builder. She may not have been aware of that when she took a co-op job at the cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf in Waterloo, but she is part of a new generation helping build the region’s cybersecurity cluster today.