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University of Waterloo Professor Gautam Kamath, along with his colleagues Professor Clément Canonne at the University of Sydney and Thomas Steinke, a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, have been awarded the 2024 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The prestigious recognition was given to the team for their paper, “The Discrete Gaussian for Differential Privacy,” research that was presented initially at NeurIPS 2020 and published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.

The evolution of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) at the University of Waterloo started under the leadership of an individual who strongly believed in the advancement of research in the areas of data security and privacy. In 2018, he was appointed the inaugural executive director of CPI and was at the forefront of the institute for about three and half years. During his tenure, he took the initial concept of CPI and expanded its eminence by steering the team to achieve the following pivotal establishments: the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC), the Chippie Cluster, and CPI’s Excellence Graduate Scholarship.

Two students from the Faculties of Science and Mathematics are exploring new ways to bring cultivated seafood to the table. Kevin Shen (BCS ’24) and Rikard Saqe’s idea to apply computational modelling to understand how fish cells grow and transform, has earned them more than $700,000 in grants from the Good Food Institute (GFI), Mitacs and New Harvest to scale their research efforts. 

On Saturday, July 6, nearly two hundred students gathered for an ask-me-anything event with Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain and a former University of Waterloo student.

Buterin studied computer science at Waterloo and worked as a research assistant for cryptographer and computer science professor Ian Goldberg. In 2013 he wrote a white paper proposing Ethereum. Buterin was awarded a $100,000 USD grant from the Thiel Fellowship in 2014 and subsequently left Waterloo to work on Ethereum full-time. Today, Ethereum is second only to Bitcoin in market value.

Several Waterloo Computer Science professors were recipients of the 2024 Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada's (NSERC) Discovery Program.

This year, the federal government invested $693.8 million to fund R&D and outreach projects in Canada. These initiatives include the Canada Research Chair Program, the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the College and Community Innovation Program, and the PromoScience Program.

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.”