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Just months ago, an international team of four that includes Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Craig Kaplan discovered a single shape that tiles the plane — an infinite, two-dimensional surface — in a pattern that can never be made to repeat.

The discovery mesmerized mathematicians, tiling enthusiasts and the public alike.

The shape, a 13-sided polygon they called “the hat,” is known to mathematicians as an aperiodic monotile or an “einstein,” the German words that mean “one stone.”

Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have discovered a method of attack that can successfully bypass voice authentication security systems with up to a 99% success rate after only six tries.

Voice authentication — which allows companies to verify the identity of their clients via a supposedly unique voiceprint — has increasingly been used in remote banking, call centres and other security-critical scenarios.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Justin Wan has been appointed one of two Assistant Vice Presidents for Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs for a two-year term. He is joined in this position by Professor Clarence Woudsma from the School of Planning.

The University of Waterloo hosted this week the 14^th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), held over five days at Federation Hall.

Last weekend, University of Waterloo students on a multi-school autonomous racing team achieved a personal best speed of 173.8 kph at a race on the Monza F1 Circuit in Milan, Italy.

The race, which featured five teams with members from universities around the world, was the Waterloo students’ fifth race, and the first on a road course rather than a banked oval track.

Sihang Liu joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2023. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, where he was advised by Professor Samira Khan. His doctoral research focused on building system support for a new memory technology called persistent memory, spanning both the software and hardware stacks. He has a B.S. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Michigan through the dual-degree program.

Muhammad Sulaiman, Mahdieh Ahmadi, Mohammad A. Salahuddin, and Raouf Boutaba from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and their colleague Aladdin Saleh from Rogers Communications have won the NOMS 2023 Best Paper Award for “Generalizable Resource Scaling of 5G Slices using Constrained Reinforcement Learning.”

Two teams of Waterloo Region elementary school students have progressed to the semi-finals in the junior division of the 2023 Technovation Girls Challenge. Technovation Girls is an international 12-week program with regional chapters that equips girls and young women, including transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid individuals ages 10 to 18 with problem-solving, leadership and coding skills to become the next generation of tech entrepreneurs and leaders. 

Waterloo does it again.

Just as a trio of coders had in 2021, a team of three Waterloo algorithmic programmers has topped the competition at the 2023 International Collegiate Programming Contest North America Championship held on May 29, 2023 at the University of Central Florida.

Waterloo overcame the competition, including trios of programmers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Harvard, and the University of Toronto.

Incoming master’s student Jimmy Di has received a 2023–24 Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence from the Vector Institute. These merit-based entrance scholarships provide $17,500 for one year of full-time study and are awarded to top students who have been admitted into an AI-related master’s program in an Ontario university.