Waterloo Math

Congratulations to Cheriton School of Computer Science PhD student, Bella Chen, on winning $10,000 in seed funding at the Academy of Research Commercialization’s (ARC) inaugural Pitch Day for her technology designed to support neurodivergent children!

Bella created AttentionGo, a home-based program that helps children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) strengthen their attention skills. The program leverages neurofeedback training (NFT), a computer-based program that gives real-time feedback in the form of sounds or games to help people regulate their own brain activity.

Read more here: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/attention-attention-bella-chen-wins-big-arc-pitch-day-2026

Congratulations to University of Waterloo David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science researchers, Aswad Tariq (MMath ’25), Alexandru Bara (MMath ’25), and Professor Urs Hengartner for winning the Best Paper Award at the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium in Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), a leading cybersecurity and privacy conference.

The team received the award for their research on behavioural biometrics. Unlike traditional biometrics, behavioural biometrics measure and analyze patterns in a user’s behaviour, such as their typing speed, keystroke dynamics, and mouse movements. Typically, these patterns are consistent and challenging to imitate, making behavioural biometrics effective tools for fraud detection and prevention. They are also often perceived as less invasive than physical biometric methods.

Read more here: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/tracking-good-cybersecurity-team-wins-best-paper-award

Congratulations to team G-00SE, whose project “Ariadne” won the 2026 Airbus Fly Your Ideas Challenge!

The interdisciplinary five-person team consists of Manya Singla (Computer Science); Mahati Tadepalli (Computer Science/Business Administration); Norah Miriam (Computer Science); Manasa Srivatsan (Geography and Aviation) and Aaisha Pathan (Computer Science).

The annual Fly Your Ideas Challenge invites university students from around the world to tackle real-life aerospace challenges alongside industry experts. This year more than 1,900 students from 60 countries competed with the finalists earning the opportunity to attend the Farnborough International Airshow in the UK and exclusive internship opportunities with Airbus.

Read more about Team G-00SE’s incredible achievement: https://uwaterloo.ca/news/interdisciplinary-waterloo-team-wins-international-airbus

University of Waterloo

We’re proud to share that the University of Waterloo is partnering with Cohere, a Canada-founded artificial intelligence (AI) company and global leader in sovereign AI, to develop new ways for students to learn how to lead AI transformation inside organizations.

Through the partnership, Cohere will support Waterloo’s Future of Work Institute in developing a new AI Transformation and Change Management certificate. The program will equip students with the practical skills needed to help workplaces adopt AI securely, responsibly and in ways that address real operational challenges.

Read more about the partnership here: https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/partnering-lead-ai-transformation-across-organizations

Congratulations to Professor Gautam Kamath and his collaborators on receiving the runner-up Caspar Bowden Award at the 2026 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)!

Established in 2003, this award recognizes researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technologies.

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.

Read more about their research here: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/gautam-kamath-colleagues-receive-runner-2026-caspar-bowden-pet-award

As North America's only dedicated Faculty of Mathematics, we've built a community where mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and interdisciplinary researchers work side by side creating opportunities for collaboration that thrive within our distinctive structure.

We're proud to be featured in ICM TV at this year’s International Congress of Mathematicians, highlighting some of the people, research, and community that make our Faculty unique.

Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/7Ov-qG_BvJo?si=6s3SHxLubilQnigy

International Mathematical Union

University of Waterloo

Empowering a Global Mathematics Community | Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo The faculty of Mathematics at University of Waterloo is a unique in...