David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

A team of theoretical neuroscientists has received the European Neural Network Society Best Paper Award at ICANN 2024, the 33^rd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks. The prestigious recognition was given for their paper “Biologically-plausible Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling from Vector Symbolic Algebra-encoded Distributions.”

Led by P. Michael Furlong, Research Officer at the NRC-UW Collaboration Centre, along with colleagues Kathryn Simone, Nicole Dumont, Madeleine Bartlett, Terrence Stewart and Professors Jeff Orchard and Chris Eliasmith, the work describes a way that a network of spiking neurons can generate random samples from a probability distribution. The distribution is encoded using vector symbolic algebra, a type of compositional language embedded in a vector space.

An international team of security researchers has received the prestigious 2024 Best Portuguese Internet Research Award from the Portuguese Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC.pt). The researchers were recognized for their paper, “Flow Correlation Attacks on Tor Onion Service Sessions with Sliding Subset Sum,” work that uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the Tor network.

Student-led installation attracted 3,000 visitors at the annual Lumen festival