Seminar Series

Waterloo.AI hosts monthly seminar series to foster discussion and collaboration around active topics of AI research at University of Waterloo. Each seminar includes a talk by a guest speaker audience discussion, and a following reception with light refreshments for further discussion and networking. Please click the topic links for details. Past seminar recordings are available on YouTube.

Upcoming Seminars

Date & Time	Platform	Speaker	Topic
June 2, 2022	Zoom and In-person (DC 1304)	Prof. Oliver Schulte, Simon Fraser University	Valuing Hockey Actions and Ranking Players With Reinforcement Learning
June 23, 2022	Zoom and In-person (DC 1304)	Priyank Jaini, Research Scientist at Google	Exploiting Symmetries for Probabilistic Generative Modelling

Past seminars

Spring 2022

Date	Speaker	Topic	Video
May 26, 2022	Greg Yang, Senior Researcher at Microsoft	Tuning GPT-3 on a Single GPU via Zero-Shot Hyperparameter Transfer
May 12, 2022	Dr. Adam Wagner, Postdoc at Tel Aviv University	A simple RL setup to find counterexamples to open conjectures in mathematics

Winter 2022

Date	Speaker	Topic
Mar. 17, 2022	Prof. Dorsa Sadigh	Learning from Non-Traditional Souces of Data
Mar. 3, 2022	Prof. Jackie C. K. Cheung	Keeping Track of Entities Over Time, Minds, and Knowledge Sources
Feb. 3, 2022	Prof. Martha White	Developing Reinforcement Learning Agents that Learn Many Subtasks

Fall 2021

Date	Speaker	Topic	Video
Nov. 9, 2021	Prof. Elias Khalil	Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Combinatorial Optimization: The Case of Bipartite Matching

Spring 2021

Date	Speaker	Topic	Video
May 18, 2021	Prof. Katja Mombaur	Embodied intelligence for human-centred robots - Combining model-based optimization with model-free methods

Winter 2021

Date	Speaker	Topic
Apr. 20, 2021	Animesh Garg	Building blocks of Generalizable Autonomy in Robotics
Apr. 6, 2021	Andreas Loukas	Erdos Goes Neural: an Unsupervised Learning Framework for Combinatorial Optimization on Graphs
Mar. 9, 2021	Dr. Thomas Dietterich	Providing Prospective Guarantees on the Performance of MDP Policies
Jan. 12, 2021	Dr. Mark Riedl	The Quest for Automated Story Generation

Fall 2020

Date	Speaker	Topic
Dec. 1, 2020	Prof. Graham Taylor	Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks: Iterative Generation and Holistic Evaluation
Nov. 19, 2020	Prof. Peter van Beek, Prof. Hamid Tizhoosh, Prof. Kate Larson, Prof. Wayne Chang, Kevin Tuer (Communitech), & Prof. Charles Clarke	AI for Managers and Executives - Webinar Series Pt.3 - Preparing Your Organization to Leverage AI at Scale
Nov. 5, 2020	Prof. Peter van Beek, Prof. Wayne Chang & Prof. Pascal Poupart Graduate Students: Stefanie Bruinsma, Esteban Veintimalla & Cristen Brown	AI for Managers and Executives - Webinar Series Pt. 2 - From the Lab to Production
Nov. 3, 2020	Dr. Emtiyaz Khan	Towards Life-Long Deep Learning with Bayes
Oct. 29, 2020	Prof. Vijay Ganesh	Machine Learning and Logic Solvers: The Next Frontier
Oct. 22, 2020	Prof. Fakhri Karray & Prof. Hamid Tizhoosh	AI for Managers and Executives - Webinar Series Pt. 1 - Separating Fact From Fiction
Oct. 6, 2020	Prof. Taylor	Reinforcement learning in the real world - how to "cheat" and still feel good about it
Sept. 15, 2020	Dr. Ashkan Sami	Dependability and Security and How to Improve Both at the Same Time

Winter 2020

Date	Speaker	Topic	Video
Jan. 17, 2020	Ryan Smith	Emotion-cognition Interactions as Deep Active Inference
Jan. 10, 2020	Roger Melko	Designing a quantum computer with generative models

Fall 2019

Date	Speaker	Topic
Dec. 6, 2019	Qiang Liu	Recent Applications of Stein's Method in Machine Learning
Dec. 5, 2019	Kristian Kersting	Deep Machines That Know When They Do not Know
Nov. 22, 2019	Paul Hebert	Progress Towards Planetary Biosurveillance
Nov. 8, 2019	Chris Eliasmith	Spiking Neural Networks for More Efficient AI Algorithms
Oct. 4, 2019	Pascal Poupart	Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Sept. 12, 2019	Mark Crowley	Artificial Intelligence on Fire!

Spring 2019

Date	Speaker	Topic	Video
Jul. 30, 2019	Kimon Fountoulakis	Local Graph Clustering
May 28, 2019	Shai Ben-David	Unsupervised learning; what can, what can't and what should not be done

Winter 2019

Date	Speaker	Topic
Apr. 29, 2019	Kerstin Dautenhahn	Human-robot interaction: Challenges and Opportunities
Mar. 25, 2019	Seyed Majid Zahedi	Game-Theoretic Approach to Resource Management in Computer Systems
Mar. 1, 2019	Amir Shabani	Human-centered Intelligent Systems
Feb. 25, 2019	Khalid Al-Kofahi	AI and ML at Thomson Reuters
Jan. 28, 2019	Yuri Boykov	Reconstructing Whole Vessel-tree: Challenges, Geometric Priors, and Optimization
Jan. 25, 2019	Xiao-Ping Zhang	Multimedia Machine Learning/AI for Multimedia Content Analysis

Fall 2018

Date	Speaker	Topic
Nov. 26, 2018	Robin Cohen	Trust modeling in multiagent systems: a look back and a look ahead
Oct. 29, 2018	Vijay Ganesh	Machine Learning for SAT Solvers
Sept. 24, 2018	Hamid Tizhoosh	Artificial Intelligence - History, Opportunities and Challenges