News

The 2011 Derick Wood Graduate Scholarship has been awarded to Jakub Truszkowski, a student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science since 2008. Jakub designs fast algorithms for building evolutionary trees from DNA sequences. This problem is one of the oldest computational biology problems, as evolution is the core of modern biology. The two methods that Jakub has developed with his advisor, Professor Dan Brown, focus on speed and on algorithmic simplicity.

Professor Raouf Boutaba has been named a Fellow of the IEEE, "for contributions to automated network and service management methodologies and applications." IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious designation.

Staff who have worked at the University of Waterloo for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 or more years will be recognized at a reception this November. The School congratulates: Daniel Allen, Philippe Beldowski, Caroline Kierstead, Jessica Miranda, Debbie Mustin, Omar Nafees, Suzana Pinto, Wendy Rush, Ian Turner and Michelle Wagler for reaching an anniversary milestone. Collectively, they have worked 150 years at Waterloo.

Fields Institute Workshop on Hybrid Methodologies for Symbolic-Numeric Computation will be held at University of Waterloo on November 16-19 in DC1302. With more than 25 speakers from the numeric and symbolic research communities, this Fields Institute Workshop will focus on the synthesis of symbolic and numeric techniques for algebraic problems and their applications to control theory, industrial modelling, dynamical systems, and other related topics. Registration is free so plan to attend any talk.

Professor Ian Goldberg of the Cheriton School of Computer Science will be awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, at a ceremony in San Francisco this month.

The Waterloo Black team composed of Tyson Andre (2A software engineering), Benoit Maurin (mathematics), and Anton Raichuk (Cheriton PhD student) won the ACM East Central North America Regional section of the ACM International Collegiate Programming competition this October. They solved all nine problems of the five-hour contest in just over four hours. Runners-up, the University of Toronto and Carnegie Mellon University, solved eight problems. The Waterloo Gold team placed 5th and Waterloo Red team was 17th.

Kamran Tirdad and Pedram Ghodsnia, in collaboration with Cheriton professors, J. Ian Munro and Alejandro López-Ortiz won the Best Student Paper Award for their paper COCA Filters: Co-Occurrence Aware Bloom Filters at the 18th edition of the Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval.

A paper entitled, "An Exploratory Study of the Evolution of Communicated Information about the Execution of Large Software Systems," by Weiyi (Ian) Shang, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan, Michael W. Godfrey, Mohamed Nasser, Parminder Flora, won best paper at the 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering held in Limerick, Ireland this October. "While there are several authors, all but one of them, Adams, have strong Waterloo ties," said Cheriton Professor Michael Godfrey.

Jeremy Clark of the Cheriton School of Computer Science will be in attendance at fall convocation to receive the Doctoral Alumni Gold medal for outstanding academic achievement. "Jeremy's research record, which is both diverse and of very high quality, is astonishing for someone just completing a Ph.D," wrote the School's Director, David Taylor. Professor Urs Hengartner, who supervised Jeremy's work, described him as an enthusiastic researcher with a broad set of interests, covering such diverse topics as cryptography, usability, computational finance, and game theory.