Researchers edge out leading institutions to win AI award

An artificial intelligence (AI) paper written by Waterloo systems design engineering researchers edged out work by 21 other leading research institutions and companies at a prestigious AI conference.

Alexander Wong, a systems design engineering professor, and Javad Shafiee, a systems design engineering doctoral candidate, were honoured with the best paper award in the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference’s efficient deep learning workshop for their work in operational AI using evolutionary deep intelligence. 

William J. Dally, Senior Vice President of Research of Nvidia, presents an AI best paper award to Javad Shafiee, a systems design engineering doctoral candidate. 

The Waterloo Engineering researchers competed with top universities including Stanford, University of Cambridge, Université de Montréal, ETH Zürich, and Arizona State University, and corporations including Nvidia, Google,  Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and NEC Lab. 

Shafiee presented the paper entitled Evolutionary Synthesis of Deep Neural Networks via Synaptic Cluster-driven Genetic Encoding at the conference held  December 5 to 10 in Barcelona, Spain.  The 30^th annual multi-track machine learning and computational neuroscience conference included talks, demonstrations, symposia and oral and poster presentations of refereed papers.