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Awards & Accolades

Prof. Balázs Szegedy the 2013 Coxeter-James Prize
Balázs Szegedy has been awarded the 2013 Coxeter-James Prize in Mathematics. The Coxeter-James Prize is awarded each year by the Canadian Mathematical Society to recognize young mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions in mathematical research. Balazs receives the prize this year for his substantial body of brilliant work in discrete mathematics.

Read more about the Coxeter-James Prize and Prof. Szegedy

[April 15, 2013]

3 CMS Professors Awarded Slone Research Followships
CMS is thrilled to announce that Bianca Schroeder, Russ Salakhutdinov, and Robert Young have all been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships in 2013. These highly competitive fellowships are given to young researchers in disciplines spanning the physical and social sciences "in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field." (see http://www.sloan.org/sloan-research-fellowships/)

Prof. Schroeder receives this award for her landmark research on large-scale systems reliability, the impact of which has been remarkable both in academics and in industry. Prof. Salakhutdinov is recognized as a leader in the emerging field of deep learning in artificial intelligence. Prof. Young has been recognized for his ground-breaking results at the interface of geometric group theory and metric geometry.

Since these fellowships were established in 1965 there have been less than 50 recipients at the University of Toronto, across six disciplines, namely, Physics, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science. With these three 2013 fellowships, we now have 8 recipients of the Sloan Research Fellowship in CMS.

Read More:
Three UTSC researchers win Sloan Research Fellowships
Meet U of T's five newest Sloan Fellows

[February 14, 2013]

2 CMS Professors named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society for 2013
Professors John Friedlander and Lisa Jeffery were recently named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society for 2013. They are among the inaugural class of AMS Fellows. A description of the Fellows program, along with a complete list of 2013 Fellows, is available at http://www.ams.org/profession/ams-fellows. Congratulations John and Lisa.

[November 1, 2012]

Prof. Balázs Szegedy wins 2012 Fulkerson
On Sunday August 12, at the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming in Berlin, it was announced that Balázs Szegedy has won the 2012 Fulkerson Prize. The Fulkerson Prize is one of the most prestigious international prizes in discrete mathematics. It is awarded only every three years, to up to three recently published papers (see Fulkerson Prize). László Lovász and Balázs Szegedy won the prize this year for their research characterizing subgraph multiplicity in sequences of dense graphs (published in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 96: 933-957, 2006). This is truly a remarkable achievement, for which we are extremely proud. Congratulations Balázs.

[August 12, 2012]

Prof. Russ Salakhutdinov wins Best Paper award
Congratulations to Russ Salakhutdinov (Statistics/CMS/UTSC) for winning the best student paper award at the annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2012. UAI is one of the top international conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The paper, entitled Exploiting Compositionality to Explore a Large Space of Model Structures was co-authored with colleagues (R Grosse, B Freeman and J Tenenbaum) at MIT where Russ did his post-doctoral research prior to joining the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Congratulations Russ!

[August, 12 2012]

Another Best Paper Award!!
CMS has another prestigious research award to celebrate this summer. Prof. Bianca Schroeder and her students Nosayba El-Sayed, Ioan Stefanovici, George Amvrosiadis and Andy Hwang have won the best paper award at ACM Sigmetrics for their research paper entitled "Temperature management in data centers: Why some (might) like it hot". ACM Sigmetrics is the premier international conference on computer performance evaluation and analysis.

[July, 23 2012]

CMS Faculty recieves Best Paper Award.
Congratulations to Prof. Nick Koudas (computer science), and his graduate students, Albert Angel and Nikos Sarkas, for earning the best paper award at VLDB 2012, a premier international conference in Computer Science. Their paper, entitled "Dense Subgraph Maintenance under Streaming Edge Weight Updates for Real-time Story Identification" appears in the prestigious journal PVLDB (Volume 5, No. 6, pp. 574-585), and will be presented at VLDB in August.

[July, 23 2012]

Three CMS Faculty receive Connaught Young Researcher Awards
Russ Salakhutdinov, Bianca Schroeder, and Robert Young have each been awarded a Connaught Young Researcher Award. The Connaught New Researcher Program is designed to foster excellence in research and innovation by providing support for researchers at the assistant professor level who are within the first five years of their first academic appointment at the University of Toronto. Congratulations Russ, Bianca and Robert!

[May, 23 2012]

CMS Faculty receives Ontario Early Researcher Award
Russ Salakhutdinov has been awarded an Ontario Early Researcher Award. Funded by the government of Ontario, this award helps promising, recently-appointed Ontario researchers build their research teams of undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, research assistants, associates, and technicians. The goal of the program is to improve Ontario’s ability to attract and retain the best and brightest research talent.

Congratulations Russ!

[May, 23 2012]

2012 Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award
F. Ryan Johnson, a computer science assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences has been awarded the 2012 Jim Gray Doctoral Disseration Award.

From the citation:
Johnson's dissertation is a tour de force [...] The ideas in the thesis such as speculative lock inheritance, new techniques for combining log requests, and data-oriented transaction execution are highly innovative, and the work is remarkable for its breadth, depth, thorough implementation, and evaluation.

The annual SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field.

Congratulations Ryan!

[May, 23 2012]

Events in honour of Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz:
A conference will be held at Syracuse University on April 13-15, 2012 to honour mathematics professor (and former UTSC dean) Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. There will also be a special session celebrating the same occasion at the Internatonal Conference on Representation of Algebras in Bielfeld, in August 2012.
See

http://www.commalg.org/ROBfest/
http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/birep/meetings/icra2012/

Congratulations from your CMS colleagues, Ragnar!

[November 16, 2011]

2 Best Paper Awards to CS Ph.D. Student
Mohammad Shakourifar is the 2011 Winner of the Butcher Prize for Best Student Talk at SciCADE this July. Two weeks later he also won a Student Award in the AMMCS Awards for Students and Young Researchers (2011) for his presentation Superconvergent Collocation Interpolants for Delay Volterra Integro-Differential Equations (Special Session Category). Congratulations Mohammad! Mohammad Shakourifar is a Computer Science Ph.D. student, supervised by CMS' Professor Wayne Enright.

[September 27, 2011]

UofT Inventor of the Year!!
The winners of the 2011 University of Toronto Inventor of the Year competition have been announced. Prof. Nick Koudas, from the department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences won the award for his development of tools for social media analytics with technology developed by Sysomos, the company he co-founded with his graduate student Nilesh Bansal. Read all about it here.

[March 8, 2011]

Prof. David Fleet wins the Koenderink Prize
Professor David Fleet, a computer scientist in the department of computer and mathematical sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough, has won the Koenderink Prize for his paper Stochastic Tracking of 3D Human Figures Using 2D Image Motion (co-authored with Hedvig Sidenbladh and Michael Black).

The Koenderink Prize recognises fundamental contributions in computer vision. It is awarded each year at the European Conference on Computer Vision (one of the most prestigious conferences in the field) for a paper published ten years ago at that conference, and has withstood the test of time.

[Sept 10, 2010]

CMS mathematician and former dean wins Humboldt Award
Professor Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz, a mathematician and the former vice-principal (academic) and dean at the University of Toronto Scarborough, has won a Humboldt Research Award from Germany.

This prestigious award recognizes a lifetime of achievement in research and is bestowed by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a German-based organization that promotes academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from abroad and from Germany.

Awardees must be nominated by a German academic and receive funds totaling 60,000 Euros (roughly $77,000 Canadian) as well as getting the opportunity to spend up to a year co-operating on long-term research projects with colleagues at German research institutes.
Read the story here.
[June 7, 2010]

2010 Coxeter-James Prize
The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) is pleased to announce that Bálint Virág from the University of Toronto is the recipient of the 2010 Coxeter-James Prize in recognition of an outstanding research contribution by a young mathematician. Bálint Virág will receive his award at the Society’s June 4-6, 2010 Summer Meeting in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

The Coxeter-James Prize was inaugurated to recognize young mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to mathematical research. The first award was presented in 1978. The award is named, in part, for Donald Coxeter, the seventh CMS President who is considered one of the great geometers of the 20th century. The award is also named, in part, after Ralph Duncan James, the fifth CMS President who diligently promoted the development of mathematics.

The complete announcement has been posted on the Canadian Mathematical Society website at: http://www.cms.math.ca/MediaReleases/2010/cj-announcement

Since its inception in 1978, the Coxeter-James Prize has been awarded nine times to mathematicians with a (current or past) U of T affiliation. That's remarkable; even more remarkable, however, is the fact that three of these nine are UTSC mathematicians: Bálint joins Lisa Jeffrey and Paul Selick --- recipients of the Coxeter-James Prize in 2002 and 1985, respectively!

Bálint has been part of the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough since 2003 and has held the Canada Research Chair in Probability at the University of Toronto Scarborough since 2003. Congratulations, Bálint, for one more feather on your cap!
[March 24, 2010]

2010 Sloan Research Fellowships
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced on February 16, 2010 that CMS faculty member Balázs Szegedy has been awarded the highly prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship.

Established in 1934, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grantmaking institution based in New York City. Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. The fellowships are awarded annually to researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a potential to make substantial contributions to their field. The fellowship is for two-years.

Congratulations Balázs for this well-deserved recognition of your excellent research!

European Prize in Combinatorics
In 2009 September, in Bordoux, at the EUROCOMB (Eurpean congress on Combinatorics) CMS Assistant Professor Balázs Szegedy was awarded the European prize in Combinatorics. Given bi-annually, the prize is established to recognize excellent contributions in Combinatorics, Discrete Mathematics and their Applications by young European researchers (eligibility of EU) not older than 35. The prize carries a monetary award of €2,500.

IBM Faculty Awards
In July 2009 IBM Anncounced the 2009 Faculty Award recipients. A total 3 awards were given to University of Toronto Faculty, one of those was Nick Koudas from CMS at Univeristy of Toronto Scarborough.

The IBM Faculty Awards is a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide, and promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM. Winners have an outstanding reputation for contributions in their field.

Distinguished Service Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association, CAIAC
In May 2008, Professor Graeme Hirst received the Distinguished Service Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association, CAIAC (formerly the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence).

The award was given in recognition of Graeme's development of the magazine Canadian Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s. The Distinguished Service Award is given by CAIAC intermittently at the annual Canadian AI Conference to acknowledge extraordinary service to the organization.

IFIP Silver Core Award
Professor Wayne Enright was honoured with a 2007 Silver Core Award from the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

The Silver Core Award is granted to those who have amde an impact at IFIP through activites such as serving on committees and assisting with conferences. Past UofT Computer Science recipients inclide Ken Sevcik and C.C. Gotlieb.

CAIMS Dissertation Award
The Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS) awarded Richard Pancer the 2007 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis, entitled "The Parallel Solution of ABD Systems Arising in Numerical Methods for BVPs for ODEs". This award is given on an annual basis to recognize an outstanding PhD thesis in Applied Mathematics defended at a Canadian University during the 2006 calendar year. To see the original news story, click here.

Early Research Award
In November 2006, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation honoured CMS faculty member Nick Koudas with an ERA in recognition of academic achievements, showing a strong vote of confidence in his research efforts. Koudas was 1 of only 20 ERA recipients at the UofT and 104 winners throughout the province. The ERA program, supported by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, is part of the province's wider research and innovation strategy, which aims to attract and develop the best and most promising researchers.

Killam Research Fellowship
In 2003 Professor John Friedlander received the Killiam Research Fellowship, one of Canada's most prestigious research awards. Killam Research Fellowships, with a value of $70,000 a year, enable Canadian scientists and scholars to devote two years to full-time research. The recipients are chosen by the Killam Selection Committee, which comprises 15 eminent scientists and scholars representing a broad range of disciplines.

CRM-Fields Prize
The Centre de recherches mathématiques and the Fields Institute are pleased to announce the winner of the 2002 CRM-Fields Prize: John B. Friedlander of the University of Toronto Scarborough. Professor Friedlander is one of the world's foremost analytic number theorists, and is a recognized leader in the theory of prime numbers and L-functions. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1965, an M.A. from the University of Waterloo in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Penn State in 1972. He was a lecturer at M.I.T. in 1974-76, and has been on the faculty of the University of Toronto since 1977, where he served as Chair during 1987-91. He has also spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study where he has collaborated with E.Bombieri and many others. Friedlander is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1988), was an invited lecturer at the 1994 ICM in Zürich and delivered the CMS Jeffery-Williams Lecture in 1999. He has contributed significantly to mathematics in other ways, especially in Canada, through his role at NSERC (Mathematics GSC, 1991-94), as Mathematics Convenor of the Royal Society of Canada (1990-93), and as a Council member (1989-95) and Scientific Advisory Panel member (1996-2000) of the Fields Institute. He has served on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematics Bulletin for the past 4 years.

Updated: February 15, 2013