Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors Freda Shi and Victor Zhong have been named Canada CIFAR AI Chairs and appointed as Faculty Members at the Vector Institute. They are two of three distinguished researchers in the latest cohort to receive this prestigious national recognition.
“Canada continues to attract some of the very best computer scientists to our vibrant research ecosystem, and these new Chairs are no exception,” says Elissa Strome, Executive Director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy at CIFAR. “Each of these researchers received their doctoral training elsewhere, but chose to come to Canada as faculty members because they recognize the value of Canada’s strong networks of talent, which is key to building a successful research program. This is further evidence that Canada’s AI talent strategy continues to attract some of the brightest minds here, to advance opportunities for Canadian-led research and innovation.”
Today’s announcement brings the number of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to 132.
“We are grateful and honoured to receive this support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Vector Institute. It is an especially exciting time to be doing research in machine learning and natural language processing,” Professor Zhong said.
“We are very excited to contribute to the thriving NLP community at the University of Waterloo, in the Greater Toronto Area, and in Canada,” adds Professor Shi.
L to R: Professors Freda Shi (left) and Victor Zhong (right) in the Davis Centre
Freda Shi joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science in July 2024 as an Assistant Professor after completing her doctoral degree at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Her research focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She works towards deeper understandings of natural language and the human language processing mechanism, as well as how these insights can inform the design of more efficient and effective AI systems.
Victor Zhong joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2024, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Microsoft Research in New York. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington. His research is at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning, and aims to teach machines to read natural language specifications to generalize to new problems. His work spans interactive learning, robotics, semantic parsing, and conversation agents. Examples of his work include learning policies that generalize to new environments by reading manuals, automated curriculum learning from language, and automatically generating reward functions from language for robotic control.
Canada CIFAR AI Chairs at the Cheriton School of Computer Science
With Professors Shi and Zhong’s appointments, the Cheriton School of Computer Science now boasts eight faculty members who hold Canada CIFAR AI Chairs. They join Professors Gautam Kamath, Shai Ben-David, Wenhu Chen, Xi He, Pascal Poupart and Yaoliang Yu in advancing AI research at the University of Waterloo.
About the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy
The Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy at CIFAR drives cutting-edge research, trains the next generation of diverse AI leaders, and fosters cross-sectoral collaboration for innovation, commercialization and responsible AI adoption. Its three national AI institutes — Amii in Edmonton, Mila in Montréal, and the Vector Institute in Toronto — are the vibrant central hubs of Canada’s thriving AI ecosystem. Funded by the Government of Canada, they are building a dynamic, representative, and rich community of world-leading researchers who are creating transformative, responsible AI solutions for people and the planet.
About CIFAR
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a globally influential research organization proudly based in Canada. CIFAR mobilizes the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to advance transformative knowledge and solve humanity’s biggest problems, together. CIFAR is supported by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Québec, as well as Canadian and international foundations, individuals, corporations and partner organizations.