News

Coming from a family of teachers, Norwegian exchange student Christian Garmann Sørli has long been interested in using technology to support human intelligence.

Through the International Work-Integrated-Learning in Artificial Intelligence (IWIL AI) program, a joint initiative between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University of Waterloo, Christian is leveraging AI to enhance and accelerate student learning.

Professor Sepehr Assadi and his international collaborators — Soheil Behnezhad, Sayan Bhattacharya, Martín Costa, Shay Solomon and Tianyi Zhang — have received a Best Paper Award at STOC 2025, the 57^th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.

Professor Jian Zhao has received an Ontario Early Researcher Award, which will provide $140,000 in funding to support his research on enhancing software development through visual interfaces and generative AI. 

The funding from the Ontario government is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $190,000 over five years.

Professor Gautam Kamath has been awarded $140,000 from the Ontario Early Researcher Awards program to further his research on algorithms and machine learning techniques that preserve data privacy. 

The amount from the Ontario government is matched by $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing total funding to $190,000.

Researchers from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and Microsoft Research have created a method that makes virtual reality more accessible to people with mobility limitations.

Professor Xiao Hu, and her collaborators have received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data. 

Their paper, Fast Matrix Multiplication Meets the Submodular Width, introduces a new and unified framework for determining how efficiently any Boolean conjunctive query can be answered using fast matrix multiplication techniques.

Instead of typing furiously and constantly hitting backspace, what if you could code by just drawing out your ideas?

This vision is becoming a reality thanks to Ryan Yen (MMath ’24), a recent master’s graduate of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, and Professors Jian Zhao and Daniel Vogel. While at Waterloo, Yen co-developed Code Shaping, an AI-powered software that allows programmers to edit their code through free-form sketches. ­

Professor Freda Shi was featured in Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago's (TTIC), alumni highlight series.

Freda Shi, Ph.D. graduate from TTIC’s class of 2024 (advised by Professors Karen Livescu and Kevin Gimpel), joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2024. In September 2024 she was named a CIFAR AI Chair and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.

Freda’s research focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing, aiming to deepen the understanding of both natural language and human language processing. She explores how these insights can enhance the design of more efficient, effective, safe, and trustworthy NLP systems. She is particularly interested in learning language through grounding, computational multilingualism, and related machine learning aspects.

Seventeen students from the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University dominated ETHDenver, held from February 23 to March 2, 2025.

ETHDenver is the world’s largest and longest-running Ethereum event. Since 2018, it has hosted blockchain-focused events, including panel discussions, workshops, networking sessions, and boot camps. Their main event is #BUIDLathon, a hackathon where attendees can team up to develop their own blockchain projects.

Professor Xiao Hu has received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data for her research on optimizing join-aggregate queries.

Her paper, Output-Optimal Algorithms for Join-Aggregate Queries, addresses a long-standing open problem in database theory, establishing output-optimal bounds on the efficiency with which such queries can be processed.