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Evolutionary biologists have long known that DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all organisms, contains a record of ancestry.

But could genomes also bear an imprint of the environments in which organisms evolved? According to a recent bioinformatics study, the answer, at least for some life forms and for some extreme environments, is an unexpected yes.

As Canada experiences record snowfall, new research from the Cheriton School of Computer Science suggests that tiny amounts of industrial pollution trapped in snow can change how sunlight reaches the ground below and significantly alter fragile environments.  

The culprit is black carbon, a sooty form of pollution produced when fossil fuels burn incompletely. It can come from vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions and other combustion sources. While black carbon is already known to contribute to warming, the Waterloo research highlights another, less visible effect: how it alters the “light environment” under snow in ways that affect plant growth.

Circle has signed an agreement to acquire the Interop Labs team along with its proprietary intellectual property, the company behind the development of the Axelar Network  

Professor Martin Karsten and his former graduate student Peter Cai (MMath ’23) uncovered a subtle but powerful way to make data centres more efficient. Their research could reduce energy consumption by as much as 30 per cent by rethinking how network traffic is processed.

Valentio Iverson, Alice Moayyedi and Beihao Zhou are recipients of the Computing Research Association’s 2026 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards, an annual program that recognizes exceptional undergraduate researchers from universities across North America.

All three students received honourable mentions in this year’s competition, placing them among an outstanding group of research-focused undergraduates whose work demonstrates technical depth, originality and intellectual creativity.

Drug development is an arduous process that costs billions of dollars and can last for years or even decades. Whether scientists are trying to understand the potential interactions of two drugs or develop new applications for an existing medication, pharmaceutical research features frequent wrong turns and dead ends.

“Often, when we use machine learning to train neural networks, we’re starting from scratch,” says Bing Hu, a PhD student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “But by drawing on the enormous amount of domain specific knowledge coming from biology and medicine, we’re able to build more efficient, more accurate models whose predictions consistently match-up with existing data from the real world.”

Throughout 2025, researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science had a productive year of breakthroughs, entrepreneurship, and community building. From discovering cybersecurity risks to creating novel accessibility technology, Cheriton faculty, students and alumni advanced the boundaries of curiosity and discovery.

Mastering Japanese, art history and linear algebra can be easy, thanks to the latest AI collaboration between Google and the University of Waterloo.

At the heart of this collaboration is reimagining education and career development in an AI-driven world, spearheaded by Waterloo’s new Future of Work Institute.

Recent master’s graduate Yelizaveta Brus, former postdoctoral researcher Rungroj Maipradit, Professor Earl T. Barr of University College London, and Professor Shane McIntosh of the Cheriton School of Computer Science have won an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2025, the 40^th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.

Their paper, Rechecking Recheck Requests in Continuous Integration: An Empirical Study of OpenStack, examined a common and costly issue in modern software development, namely, how developers should respond when a continuous integration system reports a failure that may not be caused by the code.

A research team led by Cheriton Professor Pascal Poupart and Carleton University’s Professor Sriram Ganapathi has received a $412,500 USD grant over two years from Coefficient Giving to make AI systems safer and stronger.

Coefficient Giving, formerly known as Open Philanthropy, is a philanthropic funder and advisor whose mission is to help others as much as possible.