Dr. Nathalie Japkowicz

Dr. Nathalie Japkowicz is currently a Professor and Department Chair of Computer Science at American University, Washington D.C.  She was previously with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa where she led the Laboratory for Research on Machine Learning for Defense and Security.  Dr. Japkowicz obtained her PhD from Rutgers University in 1999.

Nathalie’s research interests are in Machine Learning, Data Mining and Big Data Analysis with applications in defense and security as well as medicine, environmental safety, and cyber security. Her pioneering studies on learning from imbalanced data are internationally recognized, with two major articles each having more than 2,000 citations. She collaborated with a variety of governmental agencies, public institutions and private industries including DRDC, Health Canada, Ottawa area hospitals, Ciena, Weather Telematics, Larus Technologies, TechInsights, Advanced Symbolics and DARPA. Together with Mohak Shah, she co-authored a Cambridge University Press book entitled: Evaluating Learning Algorithms: A Classification Perspective.

Nathalie’s contribution to CAIAC and the Canadian AI conference has span over 15 years. From 2003 to 2005 she served as CAIAC secretary, from 2009 to 2013 (4 years!), she served as VP, from 2013 to 2015, as president, and finally, another 2 years from 2015 to 2017, she served as part-president. Dr. Japkowicz cared deeply about the CAIAC outreach. She “resurrected” the CAIAC Herald, writing the materials herself and inviting others to contribute as well. She promoted tutorials as an enrichment to the Canadian AI programs, emphasizing diversity among the tutorialists.

Nathalie was also Program co-chair of Canadian-AI 2009, in Kelowna BC and a tutorialist at Canadian AI 2016 in Victoria, BC. She has won a best paper award twice, in 2016 with co-author Yue Dong and in 2012 with co-authors Shiven Sharma and Colin Bellinger.  Two of her students have won the CAIAC best Master's Thesis Award:  Richard Moulton in 2019, co-Supervised with Herna Viktor and Hang Shao in 2013 as a sole supervisor.

For her outstanding contribution to the Canadian AI community, CAIAC is very happy to award the 2021 Distinguished Service Award to Dr. Nathalie Japkowicz.