Olga Vechtomova, PhD

Dr. Olga Vechtomova is a Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, cross-appointed in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Professor Vechtomova leads the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab, affiliated with the Waterloo AI Institute. Her research has been supported by a number of industry and government grants, including Amazon Research Award, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research

Council (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Her current and recent research projects include aesthetic preferences modelling, controlled text generation, text style transfer, supporting human artistic creativity with AI, and designing generative AI models for creative applications. She has over 50 publications in top conferences and journals, including ACL, ACM SIGIR, and ACM CIKM, COLING, EMNLP, EACL, and NAACL-HLT. Professor Vechtomova and her colleagues received the ACM SIGIR 2019 Test of Time Award.

• natural language generation

• artificial intelligence

• machine learning

• natural language processing

• computational linguistics

• computational creativity

• AI and creativity

• AI and music

• AI and poetry

• AI and art

• 2001, Doctorate Information Science, City University, London, UK

• 2025 Best Paper Award, International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2025)

• 2019 ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award

• 2011 Best Paper Award, ACM SIGIR Workshop on Entity Oriented Search

• 2010 Life member of Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge, UK

• 2009 Outstanding Performance Award, UW

• MSCI 245 - Databases and Software Design
  • Taught in 2022, 2023, 2024
• MSCI 342 - Principles of Software Engineering
  • Taught in 2023, 2024
• MSCI 444 - Information Systems Analysis and Design
  • Taught in 2020
• MSCI 598 - Special Topics in Management Engineering
  • Taught in 2022
• MSCI 641 - Text Analytics
  • Taught in 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024
• MSE 245 - Databases and Software Design
  • Taught in 2025
• MSE 342 - Principles of Software Engineering
  • Taught in 2025
• MSE 641 - Text Analytics
  • Taught in 2025

* Only courses taught in the past 5 years are displayed.

• Vechtomova, Olga and Sahu, Gaurav and Kumar, Dhruv, LyricJam: A system for generating lyrics for live instrumental music, Proc. of the 12th Conference on Computational Creativity, , 2021

• Bahuleyan, Hareesh and Mou, Lili and Vechtomova, Olga and Poupart, Pascal, Variational Attention for Sequence-to-Sequence Models, COLING, , 2018