Fourth-year Computer Science student Tyler McDonald was packing his bags for an international conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, when he got some exciting news.<\/p>\n
The research paper<\/a> he co-wrote with Angel Loredo Lopez, an undergraduate student from Mexico who had been at Brock on a scholarship program, had won the Best Dataset Paper prize from the 2025 International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING).<\/p>\n Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ali Emami says these international conferences accept only about 20 per cent of the thousands of submissions, which typically originate from leading institutions worldwide.<\/p>\n “As undergraduates, we developed research that received recognition on an international stage,” says McDonald. “This achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the exceptional support from the Department of Computer Science.”<\/p>\n Emami and his colleagues actively seek to give graduate and undergraduate students opportunities to engage in cutting-edge research.<\/p>\n \u201cThroughout the process, I stay attuned to their emotions and challenges, and when the work succeeds, I help them recognize it was really their capability driving it forward all along,\u201d he says. \u201cThe most rewarding part is watching students gain confidence with each project, gradually taking more ownership and initiative as they discover their own potential.”<\/p>\n It was through a collaborative research opportunity that then-undergraduate student Robert Morabito (BSc \u201924) connected with McDonald and fourth-year Computer Science student Sangmitra Madhusudan.<\/p>\n The trio earned the Social Impact Paper Award<\/a> at the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing<\/a>. Among the more than 6,000 submissions, only Brock\u2019s paper and two others received this distinction.<\/p>\n