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Royal Sequiera, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

With the advent of deep learning methods, researchers are abandoning decades-old work in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The research community has been increasingly moving away from otherwise dominant feature engineering approaches; rather, it is gravitating towards more complicated neural architectures. Highly competitive tools like Parts-of-Speech taggers that exhibit human-like accuracy are traded for complex networks, with the hope that the neural network will learn the features needed. In fact, there have been efforts to do NLP "from scratch" with neural networks that altogether eschew featuring engineering based tools (Collobert et al., 2011).

Professor Jeff Orchard and third-year undergraduate computer science student Louis Castricato received a best paper award at the 24^th International Conference on Neural Informational Processing (ICONIP 2017) for their paper titled “Combating adversarial inputs using a predictive-estimator network.”

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PhD candidate Mike Schaekermann is one of 39 recipients globally and the only candidate from Canada to receive a prestigious 2018 Google PhD Fellowship.

When an election is held we often employ a peculiar kind of logic. As we mull over the candidates we may have a top choice, but if we think our preferred candidate isn’t going to win we might vote for our second choice. Or maybe we cast a ballot for our second choice because we want to make sure that a frontrunner who doesn’t represent our view loses.

We live in a world increasingly dependent on the Internet for information retrieval, social interaction and general leisure. A growing number of Internet users with cognitive or visual impairments need assistive technology to make information accessible to them, but visually complex web pages can be difficult to navigate for assistive technology.

When you look at a scenic mountain photo typically everything in the distance is in sharp focus. But this scene might be even more captivating if something striking were in the foreground, perhaps a field of wild flowers in peak bloom. The problem is if the flowers are close to the lens relative to the mountains it’s impossible for all elements in the photo to be in perfect focus — if the flowers are sharp, the distant mountains will be blurry and vice versa.

Professor Robin Cohen has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. She is the first female recipient of the Association’s highest honour, an award that is conferred to individuals who have distinguished themselves through outstanding research excellence in artificial intelligence during the course of their academic career.

Ricardo Salmon, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Stochastic satisfiability (SSAT), Quantified Boolean Satisfiability (QBF) and decision theoretic planning in infinite horizon partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are all PSPACE-Complete problems. Since they are all complete for the same complexity class, I show how to convert them into one another in polynomial time and space.

Daniel Recoskie, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

The wavelet transform has seen success when incorporated into neural network architectures, such as in wavelet scattering networks. More recently, it has been shown that the dual-tree complex wavelet transform can provide better representations than the standard transform.

Abdullah Rashwan, PhD candidate

Sum-product networks have recently emerged as an attractive representation due to their dual view as a special type of deep neural network with clear semantics and a special type of probabilistic graphical model for which inference is always tractable. Those properties follow from some conditions (i.e., completeness and decomposability) that must be respected by the structure of the network.

Current undergraduate students

Master’s Thesis Presentation: Simple Convolutional Neural Networks with Linguistically-Annotated Input for Answer Selection in Question Answering

Professor Jeff Orchard and Louis Castricato win best paper award at ICONIP 2017

Mike Schaekermann receives prestigious 2018 Google PhD Fellowship

Does the echo chamber influence strategic voting and electoral outcomes?

Michael Cormier wins the Murray Martin Prize for Best Research Paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student

Perfectly sharp photo now a reality: Improved image selection for focus stacking in digital photography

Professor Robin Cohen receives Lifetime Achievement Award from Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association

PhD Defence: On the Relationship Between Satisfiability and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

PhD Seminar: Gradient-based Filter Design for the Dual-tree Wavelet Transform

PhD Seminar: Online Structure Learning for Feed-Forward and Recurrent Sum-Product Networks

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