News

Congratulations to Faculty of Math students Kevin Lu (BCS '24) and Franco Chen, and Faculty of Environment student Andrew Ding (BES '24), for winning second place at this year’s Esri Canada GIS Centers of Excellence Competition (ECCE) App Challenge! 

The App Challenge is a competition held by Esri Canada to promote innovation and creativity. Each year three members form a group and are tasked to create an app within a week using Esri technology and open data to help solve real-world problems related to a specific theme.

Stanley Miao (he/him) is a fourth-year Computer Science student. Sharing his experience, he talks about co-op broadening his perspective and the excitement associated with research.

How would you describe your co-op experience in one word?

“Eye-opening. It opened my eyes to being in a professional environment. Co-op has allowed me to have such varied and amazing experiences in different parts of the world, which has helped me grow as a person and given me perspective. It’s taught me so much about myself and what I’m passionate about.”

Brewtrack was among four teams that took home the Velocity $5k grant.

Every year, Velocity, Canada’s most successful incubator, hosts pitch competitions. This allows student-led teams to showcase their cutting-edge ideas and receive feedback, pitching experience, idea validation from a network of experienced entrepreneurs and Velocity Coaches— and a chance of winning $5,000. Recently, the Summer 2024 Velocity Pitch Competition, took place on July 25.

Professor Gautam Kamath, and his colleagues Professor Florian Tramèr, a computer scientist at ETH Zürich, and Nicholas Carlini, research scientist at Google DeepMind, have won a best paper award at ICML 2024, the 41^st International Conference on Machine Learning, for their paper, “Position: Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining.” 

Dr. Raouf Boutaba, a university professor and director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has been appointed the inaugural Rogers Chair in Network Automation.

Boutaba is an internationally recognized expert in the management of resources, systems and services in both wired and wireless networks. His current research applications encompass a range of novel technologies, including network virtualization, software-defined networking, cloud and edge computing, 5G and beyond mobile communications networks and cybersecurity.

Professor Xi He has received the 2024 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award for the early-career category. 

Established in 2017, the Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award recognizes faculty members for their outstanding research contributions. The selection is based on the nominee’s body of work or a single influential paper from the past five years.  

University of Waterloo Professor Gautam Kamath, along with his colleagues Professor Clément Canonne at the University of Sydney and Thomas Steinke, a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, have been awarded the 2024 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The prestigious recognition was given to the team for their paper, “The Discrete Gaussian for Differential Privacy,” research that was presented initially at NeurIPS 2020 and published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.

The evolution of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) at the University of Waterloo started under the leadership of an individual who strongly believed in the advancement of research in the areas of data security and privacy. In 2018, he was appointed the inaugural executive director of CPI and was at the forefront of the institute for about three and half years. During his tenure, he took the initial concept of CPI and expanded its eminence by steering the team to achieve the following pivotal establishments: the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC), the Chippie Cluster, and CPI’s Excellence Graduate Scholarship.

Two students from the Faculties of Science and Mathematics are exploring new ways to bring cultivated seafood to the table. Kevin Shen (BCS ’24) and Rikard Saqe’s idea to apply computational modelling to understand how fish cells grow and transform, has earned them more than $700,000 in grants from the Good Food Institute (GFI), Mitacs and New Harvest to scale their research efforts. 

On Saturday, July 6, nearly two hundred students gathered for an ask-me-anything event with Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain and a former University of Waterloo student.

Buterin studied computer science at Waterloo and worked as a research assistant for cryptographer and computer science professor Ian Goldberg. In 2013 he wrote a white paper proposing Ethereum. Buterin was awarded a $100,000 USD grant from the Thiel Fellowship in 2014 and subsequently left Waterloo to work on Ethereum full-time. Today, Ethereum is second only to Bitcoin in market value.