News

Victor Zhong joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2024. He also serves as a CIFAR AI Chair and faculty member at the Vector Institute.

His research is at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on using language understanding to learn more generally and efficiently. His research covers a range of topics, including dialogue, code generation, question answering, and grounded reinforcement learning.

Professor Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo has been awarded a new Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Minimizing Human Error in Operating Modern Networks.

In 2000, the federal government launched the CRC Program to position the nation as a global leader in research and development. Every year, it invests $311 million to recruit and retain top talent and to support academic research and training at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Four University of Waterloo teams of algorithmic programmers, each with a triad of coders, ranked within the top 14 at the 2024 ICPC East Central North America contest, held on November 10 at the University of Windsor. Competing against teams from universities across east central North America, Waterloo’s teams placed third, seventh, 10^th and 14^th.

A conversation with Professor Yuntian Deng, where he discusses his natural language processing and machine learning research, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and his excitement about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

A conversation with Professor Xiao Hu, where she discusses her database theory research and its applications to practical database systems, advice for aspiring computer scientists, and what excites her about joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

Based on its program and research reputation, the Cheriton School of Computer Science has again been ranked number one in Canada in the 2025 Maclean’s university rankings. This marks the fifth consecutive year that CS at Waterloo has received this prestigious distinction.

For Kefan Cao, university has been about finding a balance between working hard and having fun.

Cao is this year’s recipient of the Faculty of Mathematics K.D. Fryer Gold Medal, an honour given to a student who exemplifies academic excellence, good citizenship and involvement in extracurricular activities. He graduates this Friday with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree.

A recently released update to the QS subject ranking for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence puts the University of Waterloo second in Canada and 40^th globally.

The results are part of the annual QS World University Rankings by Subject, which rank approximately 1,600 universities in 54 disciplines. Indicators for the subject rankings are drawn from a peer review survey, employer survey, citations data and collaboration data.

A team of theoretical neuroscientists has received the European Neural Network Society Best Paper Award at ICANN 2024, the 33^rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. The prestigious recognition was given for their paper “Biologically-plausible Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling from Vector Symbolic Algebra-encoded Distributions.”

Led by P. Michael Furlong, Research Officer at the NRC-UW Collaboration Centre, along with colleagues Kathryn Simone, Nicole Dumont, Madeleine Bartlett, Terrence Stewart and Professors Jeff Orchard and Chris Eliasmith, the work describes a way that a network of spiking neurons can generate random samples from a probability distribution. The distribution is encoded using vector symbolic algebra, a type of compositional language embedded in a vector space.

An international team of security researchers has received the prestigious 2024 Best Portuguese Internet Research Award from the Portuguese Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC.pt). The researchers were recognized for their paper, “Flow Correlation Attacks on Tor Onion Service Sessions with Sliding Subset Sum,” work that uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the Tor network.