Dr. Mu Zhu, professor of Statistics and Actuarial Science and a University Research Chair, has been named the Faculty of Mathematics’s first associate dean for AI Strategy. He began his term on December 1, 2025.
“I expect my main role will be to help build up our reputation in AI-related research for the Math Faculty,” Zhu says. “This is critically important because, at this very moment, Waterloo is not generally seen as a leader in AI, but we really should be, as we’d like to claim ourselves as the leading post-secondary institute in mathematical and computational sciences! In fact, it will be rather difficult for any institution to make such a claim these days if they are not leading the creation and development of AI in some critical way.”
Zhu has been a member of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science since 2001. An applied and computational statistician whose work is related to machine learning, he has researched kernel machines, ensemble learning, imbalanced classification, and variable selection. He is also interested in philosophical questions surrounding the “controversial notion of statistical significance and p-value.”
“In recent years, my interest has centered around something which can be summarized as ‘pairwise modeling of two entities,’ for example, player-player interactions in basketball games, SNP-SNP interactions in genetics, and – more generally – connections between any two nodes in a network, or dependence relationship between any two random variables,” he explains. “Together with a former colleague and a former student, we even explored if some of these ‘pairwise modeling problems’ could benefit from modern neural network technology. We did end up writing a series of five papers in that direction, so I would say we had some successes, although not spectacular ones.”
Zhu has done a large amount of interdisciplinary work, including collaborating with faculty members in the School of Public Health, and participating in the interdisciplinary Comp Math and Data Science programs. From 2021 to 2024 he served as director of the Master’s in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and MMath/Data Science programs.
“Like it or not, AI is already affecting everything else that we do in the university, both in and outside the classrooms,” Zhu says. In the new role, he will work with other associate deans in the Faculty of Mathematics to adapt policy and practice for graduate and undergraduate education as well as research. He also plans to “engage in broad discussions with my colleagues in the other Faculties as well, so we can tackle some of these challenges together.”
Zhu emphasizes that, when it comes to AI, the Faculty of Math occupies a unique role in the University of Waterloo. “We are not just users of AI, as everyone else is; we are also creators and developers of AI. It is precisely because of this unique aspect that the primacy of my mandate must be unequivocally focused on AI-related research itself---specifically, the question of how Waterloo can re-establish ourselves as a leader in the creation and development of AI technologies. This is very important for Waterloo, and extremely important for the Math Faculty.”
Zhu emphasizes the importance of strategic decision-making and collaboration in building a successful AI strategy, and is eager to get to work. “I don’t like leaders who say a lot and don’t do much, and I don’t want to become another one of those,” he says. “So it’s time for me to shut up and move on with doing the real and hard work.”