SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

Overview

Statistics Graduate Student Research Day is an annual student initiative supported by the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto and Statistics Graduate Student Union. The purpose of Research Day is to provide graduate students with exposure to current methods, leading experts, and important topical themes in the field of statistics.

Research Day further aims to provide students with an academic forum in which they can present, discuss and receive feedback on their research from their peers, faculty, and invited guests. Student presentations are given by graduate students in Statistics, Biostatistics, Computer Science and other related departments at the University of Toronto. Graduate students from all institutions that sponsor the Fields Institute are welcome to attend this event.

 

Theme: Machine Learning for Big Data

It is widely known that Machine Learning is a multidisciplinary field which comprises the development of algorithms that can learn from data. Machine Learning and data are inseparably united. Thus, continuous updates and improvements of Machine Learning procedures is needed in order to adapt to a relentless and massive generation of data.

In this context, it is imperative to approach the theme “Machine Learning for Big Data” where the increased processing power of ordinary computers allowed researches and professionals of different fields to combine computationally intensive methods - usually present in Machine Learning - with large amounts of data. These methodologies have been successfully implemented in leading world companies like Google, AT&T Bell Labs, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, and many others.

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge” – John Naisbitt, Megatrends (1982)

Keynote Speakers

Three renowned researchers working in companies that are at the forefront of innovation in Machine Learning for Big Data, have honoured the Department of Statistical Sciences by accepting the invitation as keynote speakers for our Research Day:

Dr. Robert Bell (Researcher Google)
Robert Bell is scheduled to join Google on April 6, 2015. Until recently, he was a member of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Research since 1998. He previously worked at RAND doing public policy analysis. His current research interests include machine learning methods, analysis of data from complex samples, and record linkage methods. He was a member of the team that won the Netflix Prize competition. He has served on the Fellows Committee of the American Statistical Association, the board of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, the Committee on National Statistics, the advisory committee of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and several previous National Research Council advisory committees studying statistical issues from conduct of the decennial census to airline safety.

Dr. Alekh Agarwal (Researcher Microsoft)
Dr. Alekh Agarwal is currently a researcher in the New York lab of Microsoft Research. He spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the same institution, where his research was primarily focused on Machine Learning, Statistics and Convex Optimization. Prior to that he obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Peter Bartlett and Martin Wainwright. He received the MSR Ph.D. Fellowship in 2009 and Google Ph.D. Fellowship in 2011.
Dr. Agarwal’s interest is in Machine Learning, Statistics and Optimization focusing on problems which arise while applying Machine Learning techniques to massive datasets. Part of his research aims to understand the tradeoffs between learning and computation, as well as designing efficient learning algorithms that can learn under a given computational budget. More recently he has been looking at approaches for learning feature representations from data in a theoretically principled and practically efficient manner.

Dr. Kevin Patrick Murphy (Researcher Google)
Dr. Kevin Murphy is a research scientist at Google in Mountain View, California where he works on AI, Machine Learning, Computer Vision and NLP. Before joining Google in 2011, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Before starting at UBC in 2004, he was a post-doctoral at MIT. Kevin received his BA from University Cambridge, his MEng from University Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has published over 80 papers in refereed conferences and journals as well as an 1100-page textbook called "Machine Learning: a Probabilistic Perspective" (MIT Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 DeGroot Prize for best book in the field of Statistical Science. Kevin is also the (co) Editor-in-Chief of JMLR (the Journal of Machine Learning Research).

Please use our online registration (link at top) for the opportunity to submit questions to our panel of keynote speakers.

Schedule

8:30 a.m.	Coffee
9:00 a.m.	Welcome Address Dr. James Stafford (Professor & Statistics Chair) Tadeu Ferreira (Ph.D. Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day) Reihaneh Entezari (Ph.D. Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day)
9:15 a.m	Keynote Speaker: Dr. Alekh Agarwal (Researcher Microsoft) Efficient and Optimal Interactive Learning
10:15 a.m.	Student Speaker: Alexander Shestopaloff (University of Toronto) Topic TBA
10:35 a.m	Coffee & refreshments break
11:00 a.m.	Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kevin Patrick Murphy (Researcher Google) Knowledge extraction from text, images and video
12:00 p.m.	Student Speaker: Patrick Halina (University of Toronto) Data Science for Profit: Career advice for fresh grads going to industry
12:20 p.m.	Lunch (provided) at Fields
1:20 p.m.	Student Speaker: Jimmy Ba (University of Toronto) Graphical models and reinforcement learning on visual attention
1:40 p.m.	Keynote Speaker: Dr. Robert Bell (Researcher Google) Lessons from the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize
2:40 p.m.	Coffee & refreshments break
3:00 p.m.	Panel Discussion: Drs. Robert Bell, Alekh Agarwal, Kevin Murphy, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Daniel Roy
4:00 p.m.	Closing Remarks Dr. James Stafford (Professor & Statistics Chair) Reihaneh Entezari (Ph.D. Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day) Tadeu Ferreira (Ph.D. Candidate & Co-chair of Research Day)

History

The Research Day was first organized in 2009 and was a very successful event. In particular, the students benefited greatly from the exchange of ideas and direct interaction with top researchers in the field. We have held the Research Day at the Fields Institute for the past few years and hope to continue to do so in the coming years.

In 2011, the theme for Research Day was Computationally Intensive Methods. This theme was selected to reflect the effect technological innovations had in the amount and data available for interpretation. The theme for 2012 was Models for Dependent Data, emphasizing how contemporary models and methods are better able to capture dependence in data. In 2013, Statistics in Networks was the topic for the Research Day

Information about the format of our last Research Day can be found at here.

Participants

Full Name	University/Affiliation
Abou Chacra, David	University of Waterloo
Aflaki, Saba	University of Waterloo
Agarwal, Alekh	Microsoft
Agrawal, Ajay	Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Alkinani, Monagi	Western University
Amer, Ihab	AMD
Amza, Cristiana	University of Toronto
Ao, Shuang	Western Univerity
Ataei, Masoud	York University
Atluri, Sravya	University of Toronto
Azadbakhsh, Mahdis	York University
Ba, Jimmy	University of Toronto
Bajracharya, Sagun	Kobo
Balachandra Bhat, Aparna	Queen's University
Balazia, Michal	University of Toronto
Bashiri, Ali	University of Toronto
Bell, Robert	Google
Bi, Hongbo	University of Waterloo
Bulguryemez, Christine	University of Toronto
Champati, Jaya	University of Toronto
Chan, Matthew	University of Waterloo
Chen, Jun	McMaster University
Chen, Webber	University of Waterloo
Cheong, Hyunmin	Autodesk Research
Cheung, Donny	Google Canada
Choi, Jongsok	University of Toronto
Choo, Heeyoung	University of Toronto
Chrapka, Phil	McMaster University
Courtemanche, Annette	University of Toronto
Damiano, Claudia	University of Toronto
Davoudi, Heidar	York University
Deng, Wei Qxi	University of Toronto
Dufort, Paul	University of Toronto
Duszak, Kris	University of Toronto
Eichel, Justin	Miovision Technologies
Elbagoury, Ahmed	University of Waterloo
El-Sakka, Mahmoud	Western Univerity
Elshamli, Ahmed	University of Guelph
Entezari, Reihaneh	University of Toronto
Erez, Jonathan	University of Toronto
Fang, Yihao	McMaster University
Farahani, Mohammadreza	University of Waterloo
Farahany, David	University of Toronto
Ferreira, Tadeu	University of Toronto
Fok, Ricky	York University
Fortin, Alex-Antoine	University of Toronto
Fu, Hui	University of Waterloo
Fukuda, Eric	University of Toronto
Ghasemi, Ehsan	University of Toronto
Gibbs, Alison	University of Toronto
Gold, Nathan	York University
Gweon, Hyukjun	University of Waterloo
Haider, Masoom	Sunnybrook Hospital / University of Toronto
Halina, Patrick	University of Toronto
Hasler, Caren
Hassan, Safwat	Queen's University
Hidru, Daniel	University of Toronto
Hoehn, Logan	University of Waterloo
Honarvar, Ali	University of Toronto
Huang, Xuancheng	University of Toronto
Ibrahim, Rania	University of Waterloo
Im, Jiwoong	University of Guelph
Javed, Tariq	Ryerson University
Jeya, Logan	University of Waterloo
Ji, Zheng	University of Waterloo
Jung, Yaelan	University of Toronto
Khalifa, Shadi	Queen's University
Khan, Salman	University of Waterloo
Khazaei, Taraneh	University of Western Ontario
Khosravani-Tehrani, Nazanin	Kobo
Kim, Thomas	Accenture
Kiselev, Igor	University of Waterloo
Korolev, Sergei	University of Toronto
Koudstaal, Mark	University of Toronto
Krass, Dmitry	University of Toronto
Kraus, Oren	University of Toronto
Krishnan, Krishanth	McMaster University
Le Bek, Peter
Lee, Timothy	University of Toronto
Leung, Brian
Li, Fan	University of Waterloo
Li, Jinfei	York University
Li, Mufan	University of Toronto
Li, Wei	Autodesk Research
Li, Xiang	University of Western Ontario
Li, Xuan	York University
Li, Yuke	University of Toronto
Li, Zhi	University of Toronto
Lian, Lanny	University of Toronto
Liang, Jackson	University of Toronto
Liang, Jiaxi	University of Waterloo
Lin, Wei	University of Toronto
Lin, Wu	University of Waterloo
Lisicki, Michal	University of Guelph
Litus, Yaroslav	Google Canada
Liu, Chang	Western University
Liu, Da	University of Toronto
Liu, Jiange	University of Waterloo
Liu, Renfeng	Western University
Lo, Charles	University of Toronto
Luo, Yan	Western University
Malhotra, Aarti	University of Waterloo
Maqbool, Sana	University of Toronto Mississauga
Mascher, Philipp	Queen's University
Mawyin, Tomas	UTIAS
Milne, Tristan	Queen's University
Murphy, Kevin Patrick	Google
Myrden, Andrew
Nabavi, Morteza	University of Waterloo
Narayan, Apurva	University of Waterloo
Neal, Radford	University of Toronto
Neish, Drew	University Of Guelph
Neto, David	Google Canada
Nikou, Mohammad	University of Waterloo
Parmar, Noopur	Creative Destruction Lab
Paryab, Neda	University of Waterloo
Pat, Ankit	University of Waterloo
Ponnambalam, Kumaraswamy	University of Waterloo
Poulos, Zissis	University of Toronto
Qin, Zhen	Toronto University
Raghav, Prashant	University of Waterloo
Rao, Chitong	University of Toronto
Rasooli, Marzieh	Volvox Inc
Redding, Nigel	Carleton University
Reid, Nancy	University of Toronto
Ren, Mengye	University of Toronto
Rezazadeh Sereshkeh, Alborz	University of Toronto
Romdhani, Sihem	University of Waterloo
Roy, Daniel	University of Toronto
Sadat Rezai, Seyed Omid	University of Waterloo
Salakhutdinov, Ruslan	University of Toronto
Salem, Mahmoud	University of Waterloo
Sariri, Amir	University of Toronto
Sarrafzadeh, Bahareh	University of Waterloo
Sawh, Deitra	University of Waterloo
Scaranelo, Anabel	University of Toronto - Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
Shahbazi, Nima	York University
Shen, Mi	Proteocyte Diagnostics Inc.
Shen, Qinghua	University of Waterloo
Sheng, Ann	University of Toronto
Shestopaloff, Alexander	University of Toronto
Shi, Limeng	Wilfrid Laurier University
Shum, Marco	University of Western Ontario
Sines, Gabor	AMD
Smart, Michael	University of Waterloo
Stafford, James	University of Toronto
Sun, Xiaoying	York University
Sun, Yinming	University of Toronto
Sundaravarathan, Kiran	Queen's University
Sussman, Marshall	University Health Network
Taback, Nathan	University of Toronto
Tai, Justin	University of Toronto
Tarafdar, Maif	University of Toronto
Taylor, Graham	University of Guelph
Trischler, Adam	University of Toronto
Tyrrell, Pascal	University of Toronto
Vendrov, Ivan	University of Toronto
Veneris, Andreas	University of Toronto
Veres, Matthew	University of Guelph
Wang, Caifeng	University of Waterloo
Wang, Lei	University of Waterloo
Wang, Xiaohui	RNA Diagnostics
Wang, Yi Xin	University of Toronto
Wei, Dongwei	York University
Wu, Yingzhou	University of Toronto
Xu, Han	University of Waterloo
Yancheva, Maria	University of Toronto
Yang, Jinyoung	University of Toronto
Yang, Qianmin	McMaster University
Yasmeen, Farzana	York University
Yu, Guang Wei	University of Toronto
Yuan, Zhonglin	University of Toronto
Zemel, Richard	University of Toronto
Zhang, Shixiao	York University
Zhou, Weijian	University of Toronto

 

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