On Friday, October 2, the School of Computer Science held the 2026 Cheriton Research Symposium, an annual celebration of scholarly excellence made possible by David R. Cheriton’s generous investment in computer science education.
The symposium opened with presentations by Professors Lila Kari, Florian Kerschbaum and Khuzaima Daudjee. The event continued in the afternoon with a poster session, where 12 graduate students presented their research to faculty members, fellow students and poster judges. The session was also attended by Jochen Koenemann, Dean of Mathematics, and Bill Rosehart, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waterloo.
“Every symposium concludes with a poster session featuring the research of Cheriton Graduate Scholars,” said Jesse Hoey, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “It’s my favourite part of the event because it provides an opportunity to see the excellence of the next generation of computer science researchers. This year we also had Jochen Koenemann and Bill Rosehart join us to see the exceptional work of our faculty and students firsthand.”
Professor Hoey also expressed his gratitude to faculty members who volunteered their time to serve as judges for the poster presentations: Professors Sepehr Assadi, Daniel Berry, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Shane McIntosh, Grant Weddell, Yizhou Zhang, and Jian Zhao.
Poster competition winners
First place — $500 prize
Anudeep Das, advised by Professors N. Asokan, Florian Kerschbaum
Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Models (PDF, 795 KB)
Runner up (tie) — $250 prize
Avantika Agarwal, advised by Professors Shalev Ben-David, Eric Blais
The Information Complexity of Decision Trees (PDF, 2.6 MB)
Runner up (tie) — $250 prize
Helia Yazdanyar, advised by Professor Sepehr Assadi
Fully Dynamic Algorithms for Coloring Triangle-Free Graphs (PDF, 688 KB)
