Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Ihab Ilyas and Gautam Kamath are among the 72 faculty members appointed as 2020 Faculty Affiliates at the Vector Institute. The 2020 cohort includes both new faculty affiliates as well as those returning for a second term.
The Vector Institute’s Faculty Affiliates program brings together professors who conduct research in deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence across universities in Ontario.
Nominees are evaluated and selected according to the strength of their research, the extent to which their research and expertise strengthens and supports the vision and mission of the Vector Institute, as well as their potential to engage with the Vector research community and industry sponsors.
New Vector Institute Faculty Affiliates
Ihab Ilyas
Professor Ihab Ilyas holds the Thomson Reuters-NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Data Cleaning and is a core member of the School’s Data Systems group. His research focuses on big data and data systems, with a special interest in data quality and integration, managing uncertain data, machine learning for data curation, and information extraction.
In addition to his many scholarly contributions, Professor Ilyas has cofounded two companies — Inductiv, a Waterloo-based startup, now part of Apple, that uses AI for structured data cleaning, and Tamr, a startup that uses machine learning for large-scale data integration.
Professor Ilyas was a Cheriton Faculty Fellow from 2013 to 2016 and was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014 and an ACM Fellow in 2020. He has held both an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Award and a Google Faculty Award. He is an elected member of the VLDB Endowment board of trustees and elected SIGMOD vice chair.
Gautam Kamath
Gautam Kamath joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science in July 2019 as an Assistant Professor. His research explores principled methods for statistics and machine learning, with a focus on settings common in modern data analysis — in particular, those that involve high-dimensions, robustness and privacy.
Professor Kamath leads The Salon, a research group dedicated to the study of statistics, algorithms, learning and optimization. In 2020, he was awarded an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement to conduct research on the theoretical foundations of differentially private statistics in pursuit of a central question — how can methods and tools for statistics be developed that do not violate the privacy of users?
Before joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science, Professor Kamath was a Microsoft Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
Professor Kamath completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was affiliated with the Theory of Computing group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working under the supervision of Costis Daskalakis.
Renewed Vector Institute Faculty Affiliates
Six professors at the Cheriton School of Computer Science are returning for a second two-year term as Vector Institute Faculty Affiliates — Professors Yuri Boykov, Maura Grossman, Jesse Hoey, Kate Larson, Jimmy Lin and Olga Veksler.
The Vector Institute was founded in 2017 to attract, retain and train talent in the field of artificial intelligence. Vector Faculty Affiliates play a key role in developing, growing and diversifying knowledge and research within the AI community. Faculty Affiliates have access to the Institute’s programming and are appointed for two-year terms.