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“I didn’t want to go to Waterloo,” Helen Dong says with a grin. “My older brother went here, and even though I look up to him I always wanted to do my own thing. But my mom convinced me I should go, and I’m so, so glad I did.”

Dong is this year’s winner of the K. D. Fryer Gold Medal, which is given to a student in the Mathematics Faculty each year who exemplifies both high academic standing and good citizenship.

As AI companies mature, the industry is now on the hunt for high-quality training data.

As Serena Ge, a former Waterloo computer science student, explained in an earlier interview in the article Four Waterloo-founded startups earn $2 million seed funding, “For large language models to work efficiently they must be trained on a lot of data so they can understand how the world works.”

Five professors from the University of Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science have received the John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF), one of Canada’s top research grants.

In 1997, the federal government launched the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to spur world-class research and technology development in Canada. One of CFI’s core programs is JELF, which recognizes researchers who have demonstrated excellence in their fields and their proposed project is innovative, high-quality and meets international standards.

Postdoctoral researcher Besat Kassaie, Dr. Andrew Kane and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Frank Tompa have won a Best Paper Award at DocEng’25, the 25^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering.

Their paper, Exploiting Query Reformulation and Reciprocal Rank Fusion in Math-Aware Search Engines, introduces new methods that improve how search engines handle mathematical queries.

Waterloo and Google announced a research collaboration that will examine the impact of AI on education and career readiness. The partnership includes a $1 million research agreement to create the Google Chair in the Future of Work and Learning.

The Chair is situated within a broader initiative, the Future of Work Institute, supported by a $450,000 grant from Waterloo’s Global Futures Fund. The partnership will enable a number of research and education initiatives at the intersection of technology design and pedagogical innovation.

“The poster session is one of the highlights of the symposium because it showcases the research excellence of our students,” said Jesse Hoey, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

“It’s inspiring to see how they are advancing the field of computer science. Thanks to all of the participants for their contributions, and congratulations to the prize winners for their outstanding posters.”

Anudeep Das, a graduate student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has received a $58,100 USD grant from Open Philanthropy to support his research on security of large language models.

His project focuses on developing stealthy and resilient backdoors in LLMs, an emerging area of research as these models become more widely used.

Computer Science Professors Diogo Barradas and Urs Hengartner have won the Best Research Paper Award at the 20^th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), held in Ghent, Belgium, from August 10 to 13, 2025.

ARES is one of the most reputable conferences in IT security and privacy. For the past 20 years, it has focused on rigorous and novel research in the field of dependability, computer and information security.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is something that is experienced in vastly different ways by Autistic people. Some Autistic children have idiosyncrasies with behaviour, emotion and communication, which may cause them to be excluded or to face barriers to access services. Because our society is not great at including Autistic people, many must adapt or conform to be accepted

Five outstanding first-year students are joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science through the Schulich Leader Scholarships program — Canada's most coveted undergraduate scholarships in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.