The Cheriton School of Computer Science is one of the world’s leading computer science institutions. It is also one of the largest, with more than 100 professorial, emeritus and teaching-stream faculty members, more than 60 administrative, instructional and technical staff, and more than 3,500 undergrad and 400 grad students.
The Cheriton School of Computer Science has 14 Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, 10 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, 8 Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and 9 Canada CIFAR AI Chairs. Thirteen faculty members have received lifetime achievement awards from CS-Can | Info-Can. Its faculty includes a Canada Excellence Research Chair, 4 Canada Research Chairs, and 2 industrial research chairs.
The research conducted at the Cheriton School of Computer Science is deeply connected to the Waterloo tech community and beyond. The many exciting projects and spin-offs include the following —
- Axelar — a universal blockchain interoperability network that connects application builders with blockchain ecosystems, applications and users
- Bioinformatics Solutions Inc. (BSI) — a leading software provider for protein and peptide identification
- Inductiv — an AI start-up that uses machine learning to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data (acquired by Apple in 2020)
- Maplesoft, developer of the Maple symbolic computation software, one of the leading systems for mathematical computation
- OpenText, which began with the digitization of the Oxford English Dictionary project in what was then the Department of Computer Science. This was the first major research and development project in electronic publishing and digital libraries.
- RapidMind provided leading software for high performance computation on GPUs (purchased by Intel in 2009)
- Rapid Novor — an industry-leading antibody and protein sequencing service
- Tamr — a start-up that uses machine learning for data curation and cleaning
- Watcom developed the WATFOR and WATFIV compilers, which were critically important in training a whole generation of programmers around the world