2011 News Archive

Ian Goldberg, a Cheriton School of Computer Science Assistant Professor, has been named an Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher by the Canadian Association of Computer Science. Ian's research focuses on privacy enhancing technologies: tools and systems that help you maintain the privacy of your Internet transactions and communications. Most attempted approaches today, however, suffer from such complexity that people don't use them correctly or don't use them at all, and their online privacy suffers as a result. Ian aims to develop what are called useful privacy enhancing technologies: ones with the properties of usability, deployability, effectiveness, and robustness. One goal of these technologies is that they require minimal interaction and configuration from the end user. Ideally they should provide a benefit even if the user is unaware of their existence. Over 100,000 people worldwide use Ian's Off-the-Record Messaging software to protect the privacy of their instant messaging communications. Ian continues to work on this messaging software and other projects to bring privacy to Internet users.

CS Grad Student awarded for 'exceptional teaching'

John Champaign, a graduate student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, has received an Amit and Meena Chakma Award for Exceptional Teaching by a Student. This is one of four awards for 2011. John also holds a Cheriton Scholarship for academic excellence in the area of artificial intelligence under the supervision of Professor Robin Cohen. The winners' names were announced at a recent Waterloo senate meeting by Sue Horton, the associate provost (graduate studies). Details of the award were featured in the University of Waterloo Daily Bulletin this week.

Seven CS Professors and One Grad Student Win Outstanding Achievement Awards

Seven professors and one graduate student of the Cheriton School of Computer Science were recognized with outstanding achievement awards at a reception held at the Davis Centre during the afternoon of May 4th. The honourees include Ming Li, recipient of the Killam Prize, Richard Cleve, who was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Reza Dorrigiv, who was honoured for outstanding achievement in graduate studies. Read More ...

CS Students among the winners of Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships

Cheriton School of Computer Science (CS) undergraduate student, Jacqueline Mok and PhD candidate, Carol Fung, won two of five Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships available to students enrolled at Canadian universities. "Both of these students have made outstanding contributions to the work of women in CS and the School in general," notes Professor Nancy Day, Chair of the Cheriton School's Women in CS committee. PhD candidate, Azin Ashkan, and graduate student, Wenye Yu, also CS students from Waterloo, were finalists for this award. The Anita Borg Institutehas partnered with Google to award scholarships to women in computer science from the United States, Canada, and countries in the Middle East and Europe. Read More ...

Google Focused Research Award for four Cheriton School of Computer Science faculty members announced

Professors Charles Clarke, Gordon Cormack, Michael Terry and Urs Hengartner, have received $900,000 over 3 years from Google to support research in context-aware mobile social networking. The funding will support two graduate students to work with each researcher on this project in collaboration with Google. The award was announced at the unveiling of the company's new local offices in Kitchener's Tannery building.

Honorary Degree for CS Professor

CS Professor Don Cowan will be awarded the honorary degree, Doctor of Science, by the University of Guelph at Guelph's June convocation in recognition of his significant contributions to the fields of computer science and software engineering. Professor Cowan was the founding Chairman of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and continues as an active researcher. His work has focused on simplifying access to the development of software systems and their use.

Waterloo Programming team wins Bronze Medal

Waterloo Programming team, coached by Cheriton Computer Science Professor Ondrej Lhotak, won a Bronze Medal at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals held this past weekend in Orlando, Florida. The team, comprised of Tyson Andre (1A SE), Brian Bi (1A CS), and Hanson Wang (2A CS), placed 12th overall and 2nd in North America. One hundred and five teams who won their regional contest competed. The contest challenges teams of three university students to solve eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a five-hour deadline. Crowded around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance. Congratulations to the team! View full results.

Claude-Faust wins 2011 Google PhD Fellowship

PhD student, Francisco Claude-Faust, has won a Google U.S./Canada PhD Fellowship in Search and Information Retrieval. He was the only Canadian recipient of 34 fellowships given worldwide to young researchers. In addition to his research at the Cheriton School under the direction of Professor Ian Munro, Francisco will be paired with a full-time "Googler" based on shared research interests. The Google research mentor will provide a different perspective on the student's work, and hopefully "build a professional network which will last their entire career," states a recent Google Research blog.

Waterloo women excel at Games4Girls Competition

University of Waterloo students placed 1st, 2nd, and also received an honourable mention at this year's Games4Girls Competition. For this contest, teams of up to four post-secondary school women create computer games for senior public school or high school girls using the “Game Maker” platform. This PC-based game development tool allows novice designers to create interesting games with basic technical skills, while providing a built-in programming language so more advanced users can customize their game program. Congratulations go to first-place-team members: Wing Shan (Sara) Kam (Computer Science) and Denise Chan. The second place team, all computer science students, consisted of Estelle Wan Pang Cheung, Christine Li, and Komal Sandhu. Honourable Mention honours go to Jennifer Qiao (CS), Sasa Zhong, Yeming Ma, and Sammy Zhang (CS). “This is the second year in a row that Waterloo has triumphed at Games4Girls,” reports Cheriton Professor Nancy Day.

Stinson named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Professor Doug Stinson of the Cheriton School of Computer Science has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest honour bestowed on scholars in arts, humanities and science. Recognized internationally for his research in the fields of cryptography, combinatorics and their interaction, Dr. Stinson is the fourth member of the School to be honoured this decade.

Women in Computer Science take centre stage at this year's Cheriton Symposium

Friday, September 23, the annual Cheriton Symposium will begin with research seminars by Professors Therese Biedl and Robin Cohen. Professor Biedl, recently named the Ross and Muriel Cheriton Fellow will discuss the technical complexities required to create various styles of cartograms. Professor Robin Cohen, a Cheriton faculty fellow, will speak about issues of trust and incentives to honesty in intelligent agent environments. Read More ...

Jeremy Clark wins Doctoral Alumni Gold Medal

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. Jeremy's work in the area of verifiable voting systems, noted Professor Hengartner, is "highly technical and mathematically sophisticated, but always keeps deployability and the human user in mind. His survey of the related work will likely become a must-read for researchers who want to familiarize themselves with the area."

Research Collaboration Leads to Best Paper Award

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. The paper was spun out of a project in Godfrey's graduate course by student Ian Shang, an MSc student at Queens, who took the course while doing a research term at Research in Motion (RIM). Ahmed Hassan, Ian's supervisor, who holds an NSERC Industrial Research Chair at RIM, did his PhD at Waterloo under Professor Ric Holt. Jack Jiang did his MMath with Ric Holt and is now a PhD student under Hassan. Nasser and Flor are RIM employees, and the study was done on data from RIM. To read the full paper click here.

Cheriton Grads win Best Student Paper Award

Waterloo Team Advances to Programming Contest World Finals

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. Ondrej Lhotak, Hanson Wang, Tor Myklebust, and Gordon Cormack coached the three teams. With this win, Waterloo Black advances to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals to be held next May in Poland.

Goldberg wins a Pioneer Award for Encryption Research

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. His research in the area of encryption has led to improvements, which help to ensure that cell phone conversations and WiFi networks are kept private. Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov, a Waterloo Computer Science alumnus, invented the widely used Off-The-Record (OTR) Messaging protocol, which provides strong encryption for instant messaging. For those not familiar with the award, EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1992 to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology.

University holds Fields Institute Workshop Nov. 16-19, 2011 in DC1302

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.

Cheriton Staff Reach Service Milestones

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.

Cheriton Professor Named IEEE Fellow

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.

2011 Derick Wood Graduate Scholar Chosen

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. They are designed to build trees from input data sets with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of input sequences, and are much faster than competing approaches, while still giving nearly comparable results. The Scholarship honours Professor Derick Wood, who taught at Waterloo from 1982 to 1992, and wrote two textbooks, "Theory of Computation" and "Data Structures, Algorithms, and Performance."