2005 News Archive

Matthew Millard (Systems Design Engineering), Stephen Fung (Computer Engineering) and Yu Zhu (Software Engineering), three Waterloo undergraduates who were on a CO-OP term at Sun Microsystems, are to receive the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom) 2005. Read More ...

Waterloo takes second and third place in CASP6 competition

Two Waterloo projects claimed second and third place in the Sixth Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP6). Waterloo's ACE server placed second in the meta-server category, and the RAPTOR server placed third in the individual-server category. Read More ...

Waterloo Black Wins Gold

Waterloo Black, UW's programming team, has won a gold medal in the 29th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) World Finals held in Shanghai, China on April 3-7, 2005. The team placed fourth overall and first among North American teams from an initial field of more than 4,100 teams from 71 countries. The top spot was awarded to China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University team. Read More ...

UW Professors Hold Crypto Key For U.S. National Security Agency

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) Security protocols, developed in part by UW professors Scott Vanstone and Alfred Menezes will soon become the standard used to protect U.S. government communications. The National Security Agency (NSA) recently recommended a set of advanced cryptography algorithms known as Suite B for securing sensitive and unclassified data. The development and commercialization of ECC was pioneered by the Canadian company Certicom, which was co-founded by Prof. Scott Vanstone, of UW's Department of Combinatorics and Optimization. Suite B includes the public key protocols Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) for key agreement and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for authentication. Read More ...

Best Paper Award for CS Professor and Student

A paper co-written by UW Computer Science professor Shai Ben-David and his former student Ting He of Cornell University has just won a Best Student Paper Award at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). ICASSP is the world's largest conference on signal processing and its applications. Read More ...

Giving Kids the Lowdown on CS

Drawn by the lure of free pizza and the chance to unravel such mysteries as "What Happens After You Click 'Send'?" about 120 Grade 9 and 10 kids and parents, some from as far away as Owen Sound, recently attended the first Computer Science for You@Waterloo Day. Read More ...

Summer Fun For the Seriously Smart: IIT Students Win Waterloo Internships

Ten undergraduates from the Indian Institute of Technology, India's premier technical university network, are visiting UW for summer internships that will combine research with exposure to one of Canada's premier technical universities. According to CS Director Johnny Wong, "The internship program is an important opportunity for students to work with leading researchers on cutting-edge problems, and we are excited to sponsor them to come here." Read More ...

New faces in the crowd: Urs Hengartner

New Assistant Professor Urs Hengartner joins CS from the renowned program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. His research is in distributed computer systems and security; specifically, the complex security and privacy issues relating to future computing environments, where enormous amounts of sensitive personal information will be stored. Read more in his faculty profile.

New faces in the crowd: Ed Lank

New Assistant Professor Edward Lank has been on both sides of the computer science divide, having worked in both the private and academic sectors. He has served as Chief Technical Officer at Canadian startup MediaShell, as a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and on the faculty of San Francisco State University. Read more in his newly-posted faculty profile.

New faces in the crowd: Michael Terry

Mike Terry joins the CS faculty from Georgia Tech, where he completed his Ph.D. in the area of human-computer interaction, with the intriguing focus of understanding how computers can amplify people's inherent creative abilities. Read more in his faculty profile.

Bill Gates to visit Waterloo

On October 13, Bill Gates will visit the University of Waterloo as part of a six-stop university tour. Waterloo is his only Canadian stop. Read More ...

On A Street With My Name

A street in UW's north campus Research and Technology Park is being named for a long-time Computer Science faculty member. The "South Service Road", which runs east-west and crosses Hagey Boulevard, will now be called "Frank Tompa Drive." The headquarters of Open Text Corporation, the company Prof. Tompa helped to found in 1991, will be located on the street. Read More ...

Gold Strike For AI Student

Michael Yu-Kae Cheng from the Artificial Intelligence Group in the School of Computer Science has been awarded the prestigious Alumni Gold Medal, which annually recognizes the top Masters student at the University. Read More ...

Black and Gold Strike Again

UW's Team Black and Team Gold have placed first and second respectively in the 2005 ACM East Central North America Regional Programming Contest, held on Saturday November 5, 2005. Read More ...

Waterloo ranks #1 in Maclean's

The University of Waterloo has retained its position as the #1 "Comprehensive University" in the country, and #1 "Best Overall" ranking by reputation in the nation in Maclean's magazine's annual universities issue. The magazine hit newsstands this week across Canada. Read More ...

Distinguished Alumnus Makes 'Transformational Gift' to School of Computer Science

A transformational gift by one of the University of Waterloo's distinguished alumni will launch a new era of accomplishment in Computer Science teaching and research as UW heads into its sixth decade. Read More ...

CS Graduate Student Receives Bell Scholarship

Lukasz Golab, a PhD candidate in the Database Group supervised by Professor Tamer Özsu, was awarded one of ten Bell Canada 125th Anniversary Scholarships at a ceremony at the Bell University Laboratory Symposium on November 8th. Read More ...

Early Researcher Award for CS Professor

David Toman, an Associate Professor in the Database Research Group, has received the Early Researcher Award (ERA), a new provincial award that helps recently appointed researchers build their research teams. Read More ...