News

Do you find yourself doom-scrolling, or spending more time than you should consuming negative news on the internet and social media and want to stop? Well, there’s now an app for that.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo have created Mindful Scroll, a mobile app that helps users transition from doom-scrolling to adding mindfulness into their daily routines.

Eclipse, a Waterloo-founded app, uses machine learning to choose the best credit card for every transaction

Congratulations to Professors Ondřej Lhotak and Laurent Marcoux, recipients of the Faculty of Mathematics 2024 Awards for Distinction in Teaching. The award, which was established in 2007, comes with a cash prize and recognizes teachers in the Faculty “who have consistently demonstrated outstanding pedagogical skills and a deep commitment to our students’ education.”

Ondřej Lhotak is a professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He has been teaching at the University of Waterloo since 2006, and does research on programming languages and compilers.

The "Solving the crisis:" series explores the pressing challenges of our time, including climate change, biodiversity collapse, housing affordability and more. Each article highlights how Waterloo, a hub of research, innovation and creative thinking, is uniquely positioned to address these issues. Through this series, we highlight the dedicated researchers who are tackling global crises and shaping a better future for all.

Recent events, such as the data theft attacks on Snowflake customers impacting companies including Neiman Marcus, Ticketmaster and Santander Bank, have underscored the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures.

Congratulations to Vasisht Duddu and Rasoul Akhavan Mahdavi, the 2024 winners of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Excellence Graduate Scholarships. Generously sponsored by MasterCard and BTQ, each of these graduate students will receive $10,000 for attaining this prestigious award. CPI had many high calibre applicants for this year’s scholarships, the competition was the highest level it has been since the inception of this award in 2019.

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.