News
Apr 2026 On 2026-04-02 I gave a Science on Tap talk at Royal City Brewery, Guelph: "From Barcode to Browser: How AI Turns Insect DNA into Biodiversity Data."
Mar 2026 On 2026-03-06 I gave a keynote talk at the ORF-RE11 Project Team Meeting.
Sep 2025 Nathan Grewal joined our group as a PhD student in the Fall of 2025.
Aug 2025 On 2025-08-07 I gave a keynote talk at the BIO2 Symposium.
Feb 2025 Harnessing artificial intelligence to fill global shortfalls in biodiversity knowledge published in Nature Reviews on 2025-02-20.
Jan 2025 Our CLIBD paper is accepted to ICLR 2025. Congratulations Scott Lowe and co-authors!
Jan 2025 Tiancheng Gao joined our group as a Master's student in the Winter of 2025.
Dec 2024 Kristina Kupferschmidt defended her PhD thesis on 2024-12-19.
Sep 2024 The BIOSCAN-5M Dataset paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Datasets & Benchmarks Track. Congratulations Scott Lowe, Iuliia Eyriay, and co-authors!
Sep 2024 Mohamed Mostafa joined our group as a Master's student in the Fall of 2024.
Sep 2024 Welcome MBINF students Xiao Lei (Cynthia) Du, Lubaina Ahmed Kothari, and Nate Lesperance!
May 2024 Welcome Vector research intern Ryan Junejo!
May 2024 Welcome summer undergraduate research assistants Mya Simpson, Zohrah Bee Varsally, and Andrew Comtois!
Jan 2024 Kevin Kasa received the Canada Graduate Scholarships — Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement.
Sep 2023 John Quinto joined our group as a Master's student in the Fall of 2023.
Sep 2023 NSF + NSERC award: I will be recruiting a PhD student and Postdoc who want to work on ML for Biodiversity.
Aug 2023 Angus Galloway defended his PhD thesis on 2023-08-08.
May 2023 Sara El-Shawa defended her MASc thesis on 2023-05-15.
May 2023 Rylee Thompson defended his MASc thesis on 2023-05-04.
Feb 2023 Mahmoud (Jimmy) Gamal defended his MASc thesis on 2023-02-15.
Jan 2023 One paper accepted at CVPR 2023. Congratulations Brendan Duke!
Jan 2023 Iuliia Eyriay joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow and research manager.
Jan 2023 Congratulations to our NSERC & OGS award winners: Anton, Kevin and Kristina!
Sep 2022 Benjamin Chapman-Kish, Akshita Gupta, Anton Naim Ibrahim, and Kevin Kasa are starting as Master's students in the Fall of 2022. Welcome to our four newest MLRG members!
Jul 2022 Eu Wern Teh defended his PhD thesis on 2022-07-11.
May 2022 Congrats to Angus Galloway and Magdalena Sobol for their collaboration with Environment and Climate Change Canada to characterize invasive dreissenid mussels in the Great Lakes, recently published in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods! Angus was interviewed on UG news and I was interviewed by CBC on its Radio One program "Fresh Air" to give context on this work.
Mar 2022 Canada's International Barcode of Life Consortium is coordinating a series of research programs that will register all multicellular species and activate a global biosurveillance system within 25 years. BIOSCAN, its current program, is an 8-year, $180 million effort involving organizations in 40 nations. I am looking for an exceptional postdoc who wants to advance AI/ML in service of this important and ambitious global challenge.
Feb 2022 Boris Knyazev defended his PhD thesis on 2022-02-17.
Jan 2022 On 2022-01-25 Boris Knyazev's work on Parameter Prediction was featured in Quanta Magazine.
Jan 2022 Shashank Shekhar defended his MASc thesis on 2022-01-21.
Jan 2022 One paper accepted at ICLR 2022. Congratulations Rylee, Boris, Elahe and Jungtaek Kim!
Sep 2021 Terrance DeVries defended his PhD thesis on 2021-09-24.
Sep 2021 Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2021. Congratulations Boris (x2), Terrance and Jungtaek Kim!
Aug 2021 CARE-AI is looking for a visionary AI leader who is a strategic thinker and planner committed to innovation. Be our next Managing Director.
Aug 2021 On 2021-08-01 I became the interim Research Director at the Vector Institute.
Jun 2021 Three papers accepted at ICCV 2021. Congratulations Boris (x2), Terrance and Shashank!
May 2021 Rylee Thompson became a VSAI-holding Master's student on 2021-05-01. Congrats Rylee!
Mar 2021 Two papers accepted at CVPR 2021. Congratulations Brendan and long-time collaborator Christian Wolf.
Mar 2021 We're about to start our fifth Next AI cohort. Again, we're seeking up to three AI Scientists in Residence to start in late March 2021.
Feb 2021 I gave a virtual seminar at HHMI Janelia Research Campus on 2021-02-11.
Dec 2020 Our group presented one NeurIPS 2020 conference paper (congratulations Terrance!) and four workshop papers (congratulations Rylee, Elahe, Michal, Nolan, Eric, Boris, and Terrance again!).
Sep 2020 Brendan Duke defended his Master's thesis on 2020-09-15.
Sep 2020 Carolyn Augusta defended her PhD thesis on 2020-09-08.
Sep 2020 Congratulations to Ethan Jackson on his new position as a Technical AI Staff, Scientist at Vector Institute.
Sep 2020 Sara El-Shawa and Mahmoud Gamal joined our group as new CSAI Master's students on 2020-09-01.
Apr 2020 Nikhil Sapru defended his Master's thesis on 2020-04-01.
Mar 2020 Two upcoming talks in the Prairies: ~~2020-03-12 RLAI group, University of Alberta~~; ~~2020-03-30 Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan~~.
Jan 2020 Devinder Kumar defended his PhD thesis on 2020-01-24.
Jan 2020 Ahmed Elshamli defended his PhD thesis on 2020-01-08.
Jan 2020 Magdalena Sobol joined our group as a lab manager on 2020-01-02.
Jan 2020 Shashank Shekhar joined our group as a Master's student on 2020-01-02.
Dec 2019 Adam Balint defended his Master's thesis on 2019-12-04.
Nov 2019 Ethan Jackson joined our group as a postdoc on 2019-11-18.
Sep 2019 Eric Taylor joined our group as a postdoc and Nolan Dey joined as a Master's student on 2019-09-09.
Aug 2019 I'll be speaking at the AI For Engineering Summer School on 2019-08-13. That evening, we will showcase and send off our 2019 cohort at Next AI Venture Day.
Jul 2019 I'll be presenting at this year's CIFAR Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer School on 2019-07-24.
Jul 2019 I took part in the CIFAR Summer Institute for AI & Society from 2019-07-22 to 2019-07-24.
Jul 2019 I presented at the Universite Cote D'Azur Deep Learning School on 2019-07-18.
Jun 2019 Two upcoming talks in Ottawa: 2019-06-06 Data Effect Conference; 2019-06-07 National Research Council Canada Computing science colloquium series.
Jun 2019 PhD student Terrance DeVries' work was recently featured on the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research Blog. This details the work he did on his first of two internships at FAIR, assessing developing-world bias in large-scale computer vision datasets.
May 2019 An interview I did during last summer's DLSS/RLSS appeared on this week's Talking Machines podcast. Here I talk about the summer school, Engineering at Guelph, Computer Science vs. Engineering, Next AI, re-ID of fruit flies, being a Science Communicator, and responsibility in AI.
May 2019 Boris Knyazev's work on Understanding Attention in Graph Neural Networks was selected as one of only 3 contributed talks, from 69 submissions at the ICLR Workshop on Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds.
Apr 2019 On 2019-04-08 I was named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.
Apr 2019 The Collaborative Specialization in Artificial Intelligence is a new thesis-based Master's program recognized by the Vector Institute. We are still accepting applications for Fall 2019.
Mar 2019 On 2018-03-29 I was interviewed by the Canadian Press on a story about the consequences of AI in robotic weapons and outsourcing lethal decisions to machines.
Feb 2019 We're about to start our third Next AI cohort. Again, we're seeking up to three AI Scientists in Residence to start in late February 2019.
Dec 2018 On 2018-12-13, we announced the Guelph Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical Artificial Intelligence (CARE-AI). This was featured in the Toronto Star, the National Post, CTV and CBC.
Dec 2018 I am starting a sabbatical at Google Brain and will live in Montreal until 2019-05-03.
Jul 2018 The CIFAR Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer Schools kicked off on 2018-07-25.
Jun 2018 On 2018-06-27, I was named as one of Canada's Top 40 under 40.
Jun 2018 Colin Brennan defended his thesis on 2018-06-08.
May 2018 On 2018-05-16, I was interviewed by The Walrus on a story about racism and sexism in artificial intelligence applications.
May 2018 2018-05-03: Announcement about a new Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning.
Mar 2018 On 2018-03-29, I appeared on the In Context Podcast with Kathryn Hume and David Duvenaud.
Feb 2018 We're conducting interviews for our second Next AI cohort. We're also seeking up to three AI Scientists in Residence to start in late February 2018.
Dec 2017 On 2017-12-08, our paper, led by Devinder Kumar, won a Best Paper Prize at the Transparent and Interpretable Machine Learning in Safety Critical Environments workshop at NIPS 2017.
Nov 2017 CIFAR profile on 2017-11-08: Championing AI Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
Nov 2017 On 2017-11-03, I appeared on the This week in AI & ML podcast.
Sep 2017 Eu Wern Teh, Boris Knyazev, and Katya Kudashkina joined our group as PhD students, and Alaa El-Nouby, Maeve Kennedy, and Shamak Dutta joined our group as Master's students on 2017-09-07.
Jun 2017 I am co-organizing the CIFAR/CRM Deep Learning Summer School with Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville. The summer school will run from June 26 to July 1 and it will be held at the University of Montreal.
May 2017 Brendan Duke, Vithursan Thangarasa, and Adam Balint joined our group as Master's students on 2017-05-01.
Jan 2017 Next AI first cohort officially launches 2017-01-25.
Jan 2017 Several talks in January/February: Western University (Brain and Mind Institute) on 2017-01-20; York University (Centre for Vision Research) on 2017-01-25; Ottawa University (Statistics) on 2017-01-27; University of Toronto (Fields Institute) on 2017-02-02; Brock University (Computer Science) on 2017-02-14.
Jan 2017 Devinder Kumar joins our group as a PhD student on 2017-01-02.
Jan 2017 Guelph Life feature article on our group: The Human Side of Machine Learning.
Oct 2016 I spoke at the Western/SHARCNET Workshop on Deep Learning and OpenPOWER on 2016-10-21.
Sep 2016 Matt Veres defended his Master's thesis on 2016-09-02.
Sep 2016 Colin Brennan, Angus Galloway, and Thorsteinn Jonsson joined our group as Master's students on 2016-09-01.
Jul 2016 I gave an invited talk at the CVPR Deep Vision Workshop on 2016-07-01.
Jun 2016 He Ma presented Theano-MPI, a multi-node, multi-GPU acceleration framework for Theano at the ICML ML Systems Workshop on 2016-06-24. See the technical report.
Jun 2016 I attended the Google Music, Art, and Machine Learning Workshop on 2016-06-01.
May 2016 Terrance Devries joined our group as a Master's student on 2016-05-12.
Apr 2016 Natalia Neverova successfully defended her PhD thesis on 2016-04-08. She joined Facebook AI Research, Paris.
Mar 2016 From 2016-03-31 to 2016-04-07 I visited the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience / Centre for Neural Computation in Trondheim, Norway. I gave a research talk as well as a general talk at the Trondheim Big Data Meetup.
Mar 2016 On 2016-03-01 NSERC announced the results of the Strategic Partnership Grants. Our Canadian team (with Greg Mori at SFU) received $529,000 over three years. Our French partners, led by Christian Wolf at INSA-Lyon and Matthieu Cord at UPMC Paris received €445,000. News article about the research.
Jan 2016 I am looking for a postdoc to work on Hardware Acceleration for Deep Learning to start as soon as possible.
Oct 2015 I gave an invited talk at the College of William and Mary on 2015-10-30.
Oct 2015 I gave an invited talk at the University of Waterloo Vision and Image Processing Lab on 2015-10-09.
Aug 2015 I taught at the CIFAR Deep Learning Summer School in Montreal, Canada held between 2015-08-03 and 2015-08-12. Lectures were recorded.
Jun 2015 I gave an invited talk at Computer and Robot Vision in Halifax on 2015-06-05.
Apr 2015 I gave an invited talk at the University of Waterloo Computational Mathematics Colloquia and Joint Seminars on 2015-04-06.
Feb 2015 From 2015-02-16 to 2015-02-20 I visited the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience / Centre for Neural Computation in Trondheim, Norway. I gave one tutorial and one research talk.
Dec 2014 I gave an invited talk at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo on 2014-12-16.
Dec 2014 Our group presented two posters at the NIPS Deep Learning and Representation Learning Workshop on 2014-12-12.
Oct 2014 I gave an invited talk at the X Taller-Escuela de Procesamiento de Imagenes at CIMAT, Guanajuato, Mexico on 2014-10-06.
Sep 2014 I gave an invited talk at the International Workshop on Technical Computing for Machine Learning and Mathematical Engineering (TCMM) in Leuven, Belgium on 2014-09-09.