News

If you scroll through the average student’s digital textbook or reading, you will probably see multi-coloured streaks scattered everywhere. However, new research reveals that excessive highlighting may do more harm than good.

Computer scientists from Waterloo investigated whether technology controlling the number of words a user can highlight could affect their reading comprehension.

PhD candidate Max Peeperkorn, his co-advisors Professors Dan Brown and Anna Jordanous, and fellow PhD candidate Tom Kouwenhoven have received a Best Student Paper Award for their work titled “Is temperature the creativity parameter of large language models?” Their research was presented at the 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity, held in June 2024 at Jönköping University in Sweden.

“I wish my nighttime self could talk to my daytime self,” says computer science student Josiah Plett as he recounts his experience with insomnia, which began in pre-school. 

 “I spend so much time in my head at night that I didn't feel like the same person in the day. There was a major disconnect between those two parts of my mind. It caused a lot of mental health issues for me growing up, including developing a personality disorder.” 

Damien Masson (PhD ‘23) has received two prestigious dissertation awards: the Prix de thèse L'Association Francophone de l'Interaction Humain-Machine (AFIHM) and the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society’s (CHCCS) Bill Buxton Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). 

A team of software engineering researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR ’24, the 21^st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The prestigious award was conferred for their paper titled “Whodunit: Classifying Code as Human Authored or GPT-4 generated — A Case Study on CodeChef Problems.”

PhD candidate Vasisht Duddu, Intel Labs research scientist Sebastian Szyller, and Professor N.

Seven faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received a 2023 Outstanding Performance Award. Established in 2005, these prestigious awards recognize Waterloo faculty members for their outstanding contributions to research and teaching.

Three incoming computer science master’s students, Benjamin Schneider, Hala Sheta and Xin Yan, have been named recipients of this year’s Vector Institute Scholarships in Artificial Intelligence (VSAI).

University Professor Ian Munro has been named a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, honouring his more than five decades of scholarly excellence, outstanding pedagogy and dedicated service to the university.

University Professor M. Tamer Özsu has received the ACM Presidential Award for long-standing and significant contributions to the computing field and its scientific community in general, as well as to ACM in particular. He is one of seven individuals recognized for exemplary service to the computing field.