Research
Source: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research Parent: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca
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The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science is among the leading computer science institutions in the world. It is also one of the largest, with more than 100 professorial, emeritus and lecturer faculty members, more than 60 administrative, instructional and technical staff, and more than 4,000 undergraduate students and 400 graduate students.\
Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science conduct studies on a diverse range of computer science research areas. According to the Maclean’s 2025 university rankings, we are first in Canada now for the fifth year in a row based on our program and research reputation, and among the top 25 universities internationally for computer science according to the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 Quacquarelli Symonds worldwide university subject rankings.\
Among our faculty members we have 12 Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, 10 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, seven Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one Canada Excellence Research Chair, two Canada Research Chairs, and two NSERC Industrial Research Chairs. Eighteen of our faculty members have received Ontario Early Researcher Awards.\
The research conducted at the Cheriton School of Computer Science is also deeply connected to the Waterloo software community and beyond. A few of the many exciting industrial projects and spin-offs from Waterloo are the following —\
- Axelar — a universal blockchain interoperability network that connects application builders with blockchain ecosystems, applications and users
- Bioinformatics Solutions Inc. (BSI) — a leading software provider for protein and peptide identification
- Inductiv — an AI start-up that uses machine learning to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data (acquired by Apple in 2020)
- Maplesoft produces the Maple symbolic computation software, one of the leading systems for mathematical computation
- OpenText, which began with the digitization of the Oxford English Dictionary project in what was then the Department of Computer Science. This was the first major research and development project in electronic publishing and digital libraries.
- RapidMind provided leading software for high performance computation on GPUs (before being purchased by Intel in 2009)
- Rapid Novor — an industry-leading antibody/protein sequencing service
- Tamr — an exciting start-up that uses machine learning for data curation and cleaning
- Watcom developed the WATFOR and WATFIV compilers, which were critically important in training a whole generation of programmers around the world
Faculty and graduate students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science conduct pure and applied research, publish in top scientific journals and conferences, and move research into practice by collaborating with industrial partners and by creating spin-off companies. We are committed to maintaining our leadership position in computer science education and research. \
The research activities described here give but a brief overview of what we do. Please see About the Cheriton School of Computer Science for more information.