Meet new Computer Science professor Yang Lu

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Yang Lu, an Asian man wearing glasses, stands in the DC building
Yang Lu joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Yang leads the BATMEN — BioinformAtics & Trustworthy Machine lEarNing — Lab, a research group based at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He and his students develop interpretable machine learning models to make sense of complex biological data and discover scientifically interesting and statistically confident hypotheses by interpreting these models.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of a Q and A interview. 

Tell us a bit about your research

Researchers in biology and medicine have collected an unprecedented amount of data from a variety of sources. My research builds upon the benefits of extracting information from such big data sources by building a so-called automatic hypothesis-generation machine, where the input is the big data people have collected. The outputs are the hypotheses deduced by artificial intelligence or machine learning techniques that biologist might be interested in with high confidence. 

To read more of the Q&A, including insights into Lu's research, career, and new projects at Waterloo, read the full interview on the Computer Science website.