2006 News Archive

How do you measure the impact a piece of scientific work has on the world? In a new study that measures scientific impact by the average number of citations per paper as well as total citations, the University of Waterloo's David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science ranks first among 46 Canadian universities. Read More ...

Ian Munro Awarded University's Top Honour

Eminent CS professor Ian Munro has been awarded the University's highest academic honour, the University Professorship. Prof. Munro, who is also a Tier I Canada Research Chair holder and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has done pioneering work in the area of algorithms and data structures, and has developed a variety of techniques for organizing and retrieving information quickly and efficiently. His work has wide applicability in numerous data warehousing applications, including web searching. Read More ...

Visualize This

This Thursday, April 27th, Andries van Dam will give the last talk in this year's Distinguished Lecture series. His talk, entitled, "Immersive Virtual Reality in Scientific Visualization", will take place from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in RCH 101. Read More ...

And Now There Are Four

Professor Justin Wan has just become the fourth Canada Research Chairholder at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Prof. Wan's innovative research into simulation and visualization techniques for biological processes combines mathematical modeling, numerical computation and optimization. Dr. Wan is developing ways to accurately simulate medical conditions such as traumatic brain injury and cancer. These simulations can then be used by doctors and surgeons to better understand disease, to tailor therapy plans to individuals, and to assess various treatments. Read More ...

Upending Assumptions Wins The Prize

Ming Li Becomes Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Prof. Ming Li is one of three UW faculty, and 82 across the county, to be inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in a ceremony to take place November 19th in Ottawa. Read More ...

Gladimir Baranoski Elected to Eurographics Executive

Gladimir Baranoski has been elected to the Executive Committee of the European Association for Computer Graphics (EUROGRAPHICS). Eurographics is the premier European professional Computer Graphics association, and annually holds the major computer graphics conference in Europe. Baranoski was pleased by the results of the election, saying, "I believe that I can contribute to the Association's efforts to improve computer graphics education and to promote the participation of computer graphics researchers in collaborations with researchers from other fields, especially with respect to biomedical and remote sensing research."

Accolades for UW SCS Student's Paper at Graphics Interface Conference

Özsu Recognized For Database Leadership Role

Tamer Özsu has received the 2006 Contributions Award for his longstanding service to the database research community. Prof. Özsu has served as Chair of ACM SIGMOD, the premier professional organization for database research, as longtime Editor-in-Chief of the journal Very Large Databases, and in numerous other leadership roles. During his chairmanship, Özsu guided SIGMOD onto a firm financial footing, streamlined its operations, and internationalized its activities, holding the 2004 conference outside North America for the first time in 30 years. (Continuing the international trend, the 2007 ACM SIGMOD conference will be held in Beijing.) Pleased by the “unexpected” honour of his award, Prof. Özsu reflected that the database community must now deal with the challenges that come with success: “On the technical side, the community is debating the next big thing after successfully making relational database systems ubiquitous and creating a multi-billion dollar industry. On the organizational side, we are trying to figure out how to manage the growth of the community—our conference paper submissions, for example, have skyrocketed in recent years.”

A Winning Combination

Cheriton spoke warmly about Waterloo and the opportunities facing Computer Science here.David Cheriton, Computer Scientist, Stanford Professor, prescient investor, and generous philanthropist, was on hand last Friday at the Davis Centre to receive in person thanks for his extraordinary gift of $25 million to the School. Cheriton sat smiling among family members and friends to hear accolades and thanks from University dignitaries including SCS Director George Labahn, University President David Johnston, Associate Provost and Vice-President of Research Alan George, Dean of Mathematics Tom Coleman, and others. Read More ...

Ian Goldberg: Keeping It Off the Record

“The bad guys have always had the latest and greatest computer security and privacy tools. But ordinary people don’t,” says Prof. Ian Goldberg, who joins the SCS as a founding member of a new research group dubbed CrySP. Read more in his newly-posted faculty profile.

Quimper Wins Best Poster Award

Lukasz Golab wins Alumni Gold Medal

Lukasz Golab has just been awarded the Alumni Gold Medal as the top PhD student at the university for his thesis titled, “Sliding Window Query Processing over Data Streams. Supervised by Tamer Özsu, Golab’s thesis addressed the data management needs of an increasingly important class of applications that require on-line processing of "streamed" data, such as stock market feeds, sensor network output, and Internet traffic data. In these cases, it is usually not possible to store and then process the data, as in traditional applications, and one may need to both run continuous queries to monitor the environment that is producing the data and ad hoc queries for instantaneous inquiries. Golab’s work dealt with query processing issues in data streams over which either the system or the application has defined a window (e.g., “execute a query over the data that has arrived in the last 30 minutes”). He identified semantics exhibited by windowed streams and developed techniques to exploit these semantics in query processing. Many papers have now been published based on this highly innovative research. Read More ...

Kevin Regan Honoured For Outstanding Achievement

Kevin Regan has received the Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies Award as the top master’s student in the Faculty of Mathematics at the fall convocation. Regan’s thesis was titled, “A Social Reputation Model for Electronic Marketplaces Sensitive to Subjectivity, Deception and Change.” Regan had an outstanding publication record for a master’s student, with seven papers, including one journal publication and one Best Paper award. His research was presented most recently at the premier conference for artificial intelligence, the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06). His supervisor, Robin Cohen, said, “I'm especially pleased to see Kevin's success in our graduate program, because I encouraged him to apply, following his success as an undergraduate in my Social Implications of Computing course.”

Ondrej Lhotak: A Champ Returns

Ondrej Lhotak has just started as an Assistant Professor, but Waterloo is an old friend. In fact, he was an undergraduate student here, a crack programmer who competed on the Waterloo Black Programming teams that won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in 1999 and came in second in 2000. Read more in his newly-posted faculty profile.

A New Angle On Cloning Wins Award

SCS professor Michael W. Godfrey and his graduate student Cory Kapser have won a Best Paper Award at The 13th IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), recently held in Benveneto, Italy. WCRE is the premier research conference on the theory and practice of recovering information from existing software and systems. Their paper,"Cloning Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful considers the topic of duplicated, or cloned, code in software systems. Read More ...

Computer Science is Changing the World!

We invite grades 9, 10 and 11 students, their families, and teachers to join us for our second CS4U @ UWaterloo Day on Saturday, November 18, 2006. We'll explore how computer science is changing everything from music videos to surgery. Please see CS4U to sign up now. See you there!

Computer Science Changes the World!

On November 18, 2006, we invited grades 9, 10 and 11 students, their families, and teachers to join us for our second CS4U @ UWaterloo Day. More than 120 participants saw some great talks and engaged in some fun and challenging activities, as we explored how computer science is changing everything from music videos to surgery. Please see the CS4U page for a recap. We hope to see you next year!

Li and Özsu Recognized by ACM and IEEE

Professors Ming Li and Tamer Özsu have both been elected Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) . The ACM Fellows Program recognizes and honors the top 1% of its members for their outstanding achievements in computer science. It is the ACM's most prestigious member grade, and Fellows must be nominated and endorsed by ACM members. ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves. Read More ...

Larson and Brown Win Early Researcher Awards

Professors Kate Larson and Dan Brown have both won Early Researcher Awards. They will receive up to $100,000 from the Ontario government and $50,000 from the University to help them recruit graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and research associates. Read More ...

Keshav Stands the Test of Time

Professor Srinivasan Keshav has just been awarded two of ACM SIGCOMM’s first “Test of Time” awards. The award recognizes papers over a decade old that are deemed notable and worthy of a second look today. Read More ...

Waterloo Aces CRA Undergraduate Awards

Waterloo tied Carnegie Mellon University for top showing among North American universities in the 2007 Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. Four UW students were among those recognized, including runner-up, a finalist and two honourable mentions. The CRA Awards recognize undergraduate students at North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. Read More ...