David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Float, co-founded by former computer science students Griffin Keglevich and Ruslan Nikolaev (BCS ‘20), has closed an $85M CAD all-equity Series C funding.

This round was led by Inovia Capital, with continued participation from Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Garage Capital, and new investment from BDC Capital and Northleaf.

Professor Gautam Kamath and his international collaborators from industry and academia have received the runner-up Caspar Bowden Award at PETS 2026, the 26^th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, held this year in Calgary from July 20 to 25.

Their paper, Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Language Models, demonstrates that advances in natural language processing, parameter efficiency, privacy accounting, and large language models can be combined to enable private fine-tuning of models with performance that approaches that of non-private models.

The prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology (QEII-GSST) has been awarded to seven graduate students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

In 1998, the Ontario government established the QEII-GSST to encourage graduate excellence. Recipients who demonstrate strong academic performance, exceptional research ability or potential, and strong leadership can receive up to $15,000. This amount is funded jointly by the Ontario government and their home university.