Yaoliang Yu receives Ontario Early Researcher Award to develop pushing-forward deep generative models

Professor Yaoliang Yu has been awarded $100,000 by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Early Researcher Awards program to develop deep generative machine learning models.

Cheriton School of Computer Science

Professor Yaoliang Yu has been awarded $100,000 by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Early Researcher Awards program to develop deep generative machine learning models. The Ministry’s amount is matched by an additional $50,000 from the University of Waterloo, bringing the total funding to $150,000 to support one PhD, two master’s, and a number of undergraduate students over five years.

Professor Yu is one of five researchers at Waterloo to receive a 2024 Early Researcher Award, a provincial program that recognizes exceptional young faculty by helping them expand their research team.

Professor Yaoliang Yu is an expert in machine learning and optimization. He is a faculty member at the Vector Institute, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and was a Cheriton Faculty Fellow from 2020 to 2023.

He has won best paper awards at ACM SIGSOFT as well as at multiple workshops, and has published more than 70 top journal and conference papers in machine learning. His research has been cited more than 4,000 times with an h-index of 31 as of March 2024 according to Google Scholar. Over the past decade, he has supervised and co-supervised nine undergraduate, six master’s and ten doctoral students.

“We are immensely grateful to the Ontario government for their investment in the University of Waterloo’s researchers through the Early Researcher Awards,” says Charmaine Dean, vice-president, Research and International. “Waterloo is advancing innovation in many impactful areas to develop new technologies and boost economic development.”

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