Keynote Speakers
Dr. Doina Precup
McGill University
Biography
Doina Precup splits her time between McGill University, where she co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab in the School of Computer Science, and DeepMind Montreal, where she has led the research team since its formation in October 2017. Her research interests are in the areas of reinforcement learning, deep learning, time series analysis, and diverse applications of machine learning in health care, automated control, and other fields. She became a senior member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2015, Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning in 2016, Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 2017, and received a Canada CIFAR AI (CCAI) Chair in 2018. Dr. Precup is also involved in activities supporting the organization of Mila and the wider Montreal and Quebec AI ecosystem.
Dr. Graham Taylor
University of Guelph
Biography
Graham Taylor is a Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Guelph. He directs the University of Guelph Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical AI and is a member of the Vector Institute for AI. He has co-organized the annual CIFAR Deep Learning Summer School, and trained more than 60 students and researchers on AI-related projects. In 2016 he was named as one of 18 inaugural CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars. In 2018 he was honoured as one of Canada's Top 40 under 40. In 2019 he was named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He spent 2018-2019 as a Visiting Faculty member at Google Brain, Montreal. Graham co-founded Kindred, which was featured at number 29 on MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of smartest companies in the world. He is the Academic Director of NextAI, a non-profit accelerator for AI-focused entrepreneurs.
Dr. Osmar R. Zaïane
University of Alberta
Biography
Osmar R. Zaïane is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Canada, Fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Dr. Zaiane obtained his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University, Canada, in 1999. He has published more than 330 papers in refereed international conferences and journals. He is Associate Editor of many International Journals on data mining and data analytics and served as program chair and general chair for scores of international conferences in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. Dr. Zaïane received numerous awards including the 2010 ACM SIGKDD Service Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Mining, which runs the world’s premier data science, big data, and data mining association and conference.
