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At the Cheriton School of Computer Science, researchers are using unsupervised machine learning to determine taxonomic relationships between organisms. 

Lila Kari, a professor of computer science, along with her PhD students Pablo Millán Arias and Fatemeh Alipour and her colleague Professor Kathleen Hill at Western University’s Department of Biology pioneered this new method, titled Deep Learning for Unsupervised Clustering of DNA Sequences, or DeLUCS for short. 

SkyWatch is a company that gives relief agencies access to its satellite image datasets to aid in surveying the damage and be able to efficiently coordinate a response and was founded by Roland Sing (BMath '85), James Slifierz, and Dexter Jagula in 2014 at a hackathon. SkyWatch has provided support during many disasters, including Hurricane Dorian and the collapse of the Brumadinho dam. 

The effects of climate change are becoming more and more apparent, increasingly in the unpredictability of the weather, thus raising the stakes for weather forecasters. A major concern involves the scale that the weather models run, representing wind, temperature, and other quantities on a grid of points. Professor Michael Waite explains that the spacing of the points and low photo resolution makes it consistently difficult to see the small details.  

Laura Bombulis is the Faculty of Mathematics Co-op Student of the Year because of her exemplary work in improving efficiency at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. In her role as bioinformatics analyst to investigate mechanisms of tumour growth and identify genetic and biological markers that guides precision in medicine for aggressive cancer.