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In the age of AI, many are concerned about the impacts it could have on career prospects. AI has already automated some tasks, and media reports have specifically discussed the impacts of AI on entry-level jobs in coding.

However, students and alumni at the University of Waterloo are much more optimistic about the future, and the general sentiment is that AI presents opportunities, not threats.

Among the six 2025 Co-op Student of the Year winners is Vinayak Bector, a fourth-year Computer Science Student. While working at xAI as a web developer, he made significant improvements to the company’s codebase and Grok translation pipeline.

A new national initiative to transform access to Canada’s historical records is bringing together researchers across disciplines and institutions, including Professor Dan Brown of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science.

A trio of Cheriton researchers have developed an AI-powered tool that can accelerate software debugging via test automation.

One of the first steps in software debugging is bug reproduction, where a programmer will replicate a bug to understand and decipher its behaviour. They can convert their replication instructions into a bug reproducible test (BRT), a test that fails if the bug is present and passes once it’s gone.

A lot of recent headlines have proclaimed the end of software engineering as a profession because of AI, and current and prospective computer science and software engineering students are understandably concerned about their careers.

We sat down with Professor Mei Nagappan to separate fact from fiction.

Do actions in the virtual world stay in the virtual world? A new performance directed by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Zach McKendrick explores dark themes relevant to today’s rapidly advancing digital technologies.

“If we do this well, the audience isn’t just watching a story about immersive technology. They’re experiencing what it’s like to navigate overlapping realities and recognizing that choices made in virtual spaces still belong to us, long after they take off the headset,” says Dr. McKendrick.

Continuing a long tradition of excellence in competitive programming, a trio of Waterloo students won a silver medal at the 2026 International Collegiate Programming Contest North America Championship, held on March 22, 2026 at the University of Central Florida.

Comprised of Kelly Dance, a graduate student in Combinatorics and Optimization, along with Kevin Guo and Kevin Yang, both fourth-year Computer Science students, Waterloo had an exceptional performance, solving 10 out of 13 problems, to finish second out of 52 teams at the prestigious annual competition.

Modern health care support patients at crisis points: during a visit, around a procedure and after discharge. However, the gaps between care can fuel readmissions, emergencies and preventable decline. Velocity startup Doro is developing clinically guided AI tools to ensure that connection with patients continues long after appointments end, filling the gap health practitioners do not have the capacity to reach.

Pulkit Sinha, a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, specializing in quantum information, has received a 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award.

Funded through alumni and community support, the $5,000 award celebrates outstanding research by emerging scholars in the Faculty of Mathematics.

New research from the University of Waterloo shows that artificial intelligence still struggles with some basic software development tasks, raising questions about how reliably AI systems can assist developers.