PhD candidate Priyank Jaini is one of 10 recipients nationally to receive a Borealis AI 2019 Graduate Fellowship. Now in its second year, these fellowships are conferred annually to exceptional students pursuing graduate studies in machine learning and artificial intelligence at top universities across Canada.
Each fellowship recipient receives $10,000 and the opportunity to intern at Borealis’s network of labs in Toronto, Edmonton, Waterloo and Montreal. Candidates pursue their research under the academic guidance of top AI researchers.
“We’re pleased to inform you that you’ve been selected to receive a Borealis AI Global Fellowship Award,” wrote Rebecca Wilkes, Director of Operations at Borealis AI, in the award letter. “You’re one of 10 exceptional students that stood out from a group of competitive applicants.”
Supervised by Professors Pascal Poupart and Yaoliang Yu, members of the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Artificial Intelligence Group, Priyank’s doctoral research interests range from deep generative models, mixture models and online learning to sum-product networks and optimization. His main focus is on developing methods for tractable density estimation in unsupervised learning using deep mixture models and deep generative models.
“This is wonderful news,” said Professor Yaoliang Yu. “This fellowship will allow Priyank to develop principled approaches towards a theory of probabilistic deep generative models.”
“Congratulations to Priyank for being awarded this prestigious graduate fellowship,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “He is also a recipient of a David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship and Huawei Graduate Fellowship in Artificial Intelligence. With this latest fellowship from Borealis, Priyank will be able to further expand his innovative AI research.”
Borealis AI, an RBC Institute for Research, is a curiosity-driven research centre dedicated to achieving state-of-the-art in machine learning. Established in 2016, with labs in Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Edmonton and Vancouver, Borealis AI supports open academic collaborations and teams up with world-class research centres in artificial intelligence. With a focus on ethical artificial intelligence that will help communities thrive, the machine learning scientists perform fundamental and applied research in areas such as reinforcement learning, natural language processing, deep learning and unsupervised learning to solve ground-breaking problems in diverse fields.
