2018 University of Toronto-Tsinghua University AI Squared Forum
Featuring speakers from the following universities and companies:
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The 2018 University of Toronto-Tsinghua University AI Squared Forum attracted researchers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to Canada’s largest city to “discuss opportunities for research collaboration and partnerships in areas of artificial intelligence. It was a huge success.
Organized by the North America Federation of Tsinghua Alumni Associations and Tsinghua Alumni Association of Southern Ontario Canada with the assistance of the Association of Chinese Senior IT Professionals (ACSIP) and Synced, the event ran May 5 at University of Toronto’s Bahen Center.
University of Toronto and Tsinghua University have been collaborating on education and research since 2004. Opportunities such as the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum will strengthen and advance the innovative potential between both institutions, developing a global entrepreneurial ecosystem.
For the events on May 3rd and 4th event, please visit http://entrepreneurship-forum.com
PROGRAM
SPEAKERS
Kang Lee
Kang Lee, PhD, Professor, OISE, University of Toronto, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neuroscience, and Senior Scientist at the Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego. He is a co-inventor of the Transdermal Optical Imaging technology that uses a conventional digital video camera and deep machine learning to noninvasively image blood flows under the facial skin to reveal invisible psychological and physiological activities. He is a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Nuralogix.
Hongqiang Zhao
Hongqiang (Hong) Zhao is the Chief Financial Officer (“CFO”) of BaiRong Financial Information Services Co. Ltd. since December 2015. Prior to joining BaiRong, Mr. Zhao had been the CFO of NetEase e-Commerce Business and the VP of Finance at SouFun Holdings Limited. Previously, Mr. Zhao worked in New York as the director of financial analysis for Viacom Inc.. Between February 2009 and July 2011, Mr. Zhao served as an assistant chief auditor at the PCAOB, a regulatory oversight agency under the US SEC. Prior to that, Mr. Zhao had been a manager at KPMG LLP in the Washington D.C. since August 2000. Mr. Zhao holds a master’s degree in accountancy from George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Tsinghua University.
Charles Ling
Charles Ling is a Tenured Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Science Distinguished Research Professor, at University of Western Ontario. He is a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering. He obtained his Msc and PhD from University of Pennsylvania. He has published over 160 research papers in machine learning, many in top-tier journals and international conferences, with over 6,500 citations by Google Scholars. He is Founder and CEO of GoHealthNow, which creates a platform for diabetes care using data analytics and AI. He is the Editor In Chief of CMC (Computers, Materials & Continua), an SCI Journal, and he is/was Associated Editor of IEEE TKDE, ACM TIST, and so on.
Song Han
Assistant Professor in MIT, PhD from Stanford, Cofounder of DeePhi Tech. Specializing in energy-efficient deep learning. Proposed ”Deep Compression“ that widely impacted the industry. His efforts in model compression and hardware acceleration received the Best Paper Award at ICLR’16 and the Best Paper Award at FPGA’17.
Jimoh Ovbiagele
Jimoh Ovbiagele is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of ROSS Intelligence. Before ROSS, Jimoh worked on developing technology to enable autonomous vehicles and software that can understand human language. This work led Jimoh to his initial idea for ROSS. Jimoh speaks around the world and provides commentary in The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, TechCrunch, and the Financial Times about artificial intelligence and technological innovation. A member of both the Forbes 30 Under 30 and the American Bar Association’s list of Legal Rebels, Jimoh is recognized among the top innovators in technology today.
Narbe Alexandrian
In his role as Senior Associate at OMERS Ventures, Narbe Alexandrian is responsible for researching and executing investment opportunities in the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) sector.
Narbe has taught courses in technology entrepreneurship at the Schulich School of Business, and has also been an instructor for the Canadian Institute of Chartered Professional Accountants. Narbe is a Chartered Accountant (CA) and Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA), and has a BBA from the Schulich School of Business.
Amit Deshwar
Research scientist at Deep Genomics; PhD in University of Toronto; Vanier Scholar and former Junior Fellow at Massey College; Previously worked at Google; started two companies and obtained undergraduate degrees in Software Engineering and Psychology
Nicholas Frosst
Nick Frosst is a research engineer working under Geoffrey Hinton in Google Brain Toronto. He is the 2nd author of the paper “Dynamic Routing Between Capsules”. He holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from U of T. During his time there he worked in computational vision with John Tsotsos at his York University lab and in the cognitive science department with John Vervaeke. He currently lives in Toronto and plays in GOOD KID, an indie rock band.
Roland Memisevic
Roland Memisevic received the PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2008 doing research on neural networks. He subsequently held positions as a research scientist at PNYLab, Princeton, as a post-doc at the University of Toronto and at ETH Zurich, and as junior professor at the University of Frankfurt. In 2012 he joined the MILA deep learning group at the University of Montreal as an assistant professor. Since 2016 he has been Chief Scientist at the Canadian-German AI startup Twenty Billion Neurons, which he co-founded in 2015. Roland was named Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in 2015. His research interests are in deep and recurrent neural networks, in particular, as applied to video understanding.
Jackie Cheung
Dr. Cheung is an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s School of Computer Science. He obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto and joined McGill in 2015, where he co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. His research group focuses on natural language processing (NLP), an area of artificial intelligence in which computational models of human languages such as English or French are built. The goal of this research is to develop computational methods for understanding text, in order to generate language that is fluent and appropriate in context. In the lab, they investigate statistical machine learning techniques for analyzing and making predictions about language. Several current projects include common sense reasoning, automatic text summarization, and adapting language across genres. Dr. Cheung is affiliated with the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), and is an Academic Advisor to Borealis AI.
Stephen Mackinnon
Stephen received his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Toronto, using structural bioinformatics to study systemic trends in protein structures to reveal new mechanistic insights. At Cyclica, he designed and led the development of computational proteome screening technologies. Stephen now oversees the prototype stages of new scientific computing solutions and partnered research projects using predictive informatics.
Minglie Huang
Associate Professor in Tsinghua University; Tsinghua Excellent Researcher Fellowship 2006; Area Chair for ACL2016, EMNLP 2014, EMNLP 2011, IJCNLP 2017: Reviewrs for ACL, IJCAL, AAAI, EACL, COLING, EMNLP, NAACL,CIKM, ICDM, SDM; Reviewers for journals such as TOIS, TKDE, TALIP, etc.
Yu Wang
Tenured Associate Professor and Assiatite Dean in Tsinghua University; Cofounder of Deephi Tech, providing one of the best deep learning chips and platforms; Co-Editor-in-Chief for ACM SIGDA E-News; ACM Distinguished Speaker; Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on CAD; IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT); Special Issue Editor for Microelectronics Journal; Best Paper Award in FPGA 2017, NVMSA 2017, ISVLSI 2012
Don Qiu
Don Qiu, Director for Cases Studies of the Institute of Data Science at Tsinghua University, Director of Tsingdata D-Lab Innovation Center, Council Member of China Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology Commercialization, Standing Vice Secretary-General of Tsingdata Big Data Industry Alliance. Don Qiu worked as Head of Nokia’s Global Corporate Development, Director of Strategic Development of AMD Greater China and Director of Motorola’s mobile products. Prior to returning to China in 2004, Don had worked at ATI, leading Chip Production Management and Asia Pacific Market. Don graduated from Fudan University in China, National University of Singapore, and Ivey Business School in Canada.
Rick Valenzano
Rick Valenzano is an Applied Research Scientist at Element AI. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, after having completed his PhD at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on furthering our understanding of sequential decision making algorithms, particularly as used in the development of automated planning, heuristic search, and reinforcement learning systems. This includes leading the development of the ArvandHerd planning system which has twice won the multi-core track of the largest competition for automated planning systems: the International Planning Competition. He is also interested in graph theory and game-playing agents.
Yang Xu
Assistant Professor in University of Toronto; BA/MEng from University of Cambridge; PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University; Specializing in natural language processing and cognitive science.
Tahseen Shabab
Tahseen has many years of cybersecurity consulting experience at the firms like IBM, RBC, Cisco, Government of Canada and more.He was also the lead developer of an Application Security Tool, IBM AppScan, which remains top 3 by Gartner today. Currently, Tahseen is the Founder Bibu Labs – A Cybersecurity Analytics startup leveraging AI algorithms to pinpoint obscure attacks while lowering false positives.
Lei Xin
Lei Xin is the CTO of Bioinformatics Solutions Inc. Over the past 10 years, Lei dedicated to designing and implementing the algorithms of mass spectrometry data analysis for proteomics research. Lei improved the PEAKS denovo sequencing algorithm which now is still the golden standard of the industry. Lei also designed and implemented the PEAKS DB search engine which is one of top 3 search engines for proteomics research. Lei holds a bachelor’s degree in computational mathematics from Peking University and a Ph.D in bioinformatics from Western University. He now oversees the innovation project which use deep learning technology to analyse mass spectrometry data in BSI.
Vincent Chio
Vincent Chio is a senior data scientist at Shopify where he led his team in applying machine learning to build marketing intelligence to grow merchants’ business. Vincent received his Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley.
Greta Cutulenco
Greta Cutulenco is the CEO and co-founder of Acerta Analytics Solutions. She has years of experience working with automotive OEMs and Tier-1 manufacturers, having worked at Bombardier and at Magna in the area of system testing, health monitoring, and analysis, and at AECL (nuclear) on testing processes and security vulnerability analysis. Her M.Sc research at the University of Waterloo focused on automatic analysis of data for testing and anomaly detection.
Anthony Niblett
Anthony Niblett is a co-founder of Blue J Legal and holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Economics & Innovation at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Professor Niblett conducts research on big data, law and economics, contract law, and judicial behaviour. His research has appeared in many leading academic journals, including the International Review of Law & Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, and the European Journal of Law and Economics. His research has been funded by the Connaught Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Before joining the University of Toronto in 2011, Professor Niblett was a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer-in-Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Amir Feizpour
Amir Feizpour is a Senior Manager at the Enterprise Data Science team at Royal Bank of Canada. He is also a Scientific Advisor at SEMA Lab. At RBC, Amir manages a small team with a focus on enabling internal clients with data science tools and practices. Prior to this, he held a post-doctoral position at University of Oxford conducting research on experimental quantum computing. Amir holds a PhD in Physics from University of Toronto.
Ying Shan
Ying Shan is the Product Director of RSVP.ai. Ying has been in charge of transforming the company’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies into consumable products. In the past 6 years, Ying has been dedicated to the study of human computer interaction, especially for conversational user experience and voice user interface. Ying holds a BA degree in Multimedia from McMaster University, and a MSc degree in Computer Science from Bristol University.
Date: May 5, 2018 (Saturday)
Location: Bahen Center for Information Technology, University of Toronto (40 St George St, Toronto)
This event is jointly organized by the below organizations:
Established in 1972, Tsinghua Alumni Associa tion of Southern Ontario Canada (http://www.tsinghua-so.org) became an Ontario not-for-profit corporation on September 30, 2004. For the past 40 plus years, we aimed to carry forward the Tsinghua tradition of “Strengthen self without stopping, and hold world with virtue”. We have been focusing on providing the services to all the alumni in Southern Ontario area, both from Beijing and Hsinchu. We have over one thousand alumni in the area of Academia, Education, Biology, Mechanics, Electronics, Information Technology, Finance, Architecture, Real Estate Investment, etc.
ACSIP (Association of Chinese Senior IT Professionals, http://www.acsip.org) was founded inToronto in 2006 by a group of pioneering Chinese IT entrepreneurs and professionals. They hoped to encourage individual career and business development by building a community that facilitates information exchange among those senior IT professionals.
The mission of ACSIP is to encourage and assist in Chinese IT professionals to advance in technical knowledge, personal career and business building through a trusted network among seasoned Chinese ITprofessionals. It is a dedicated forum that facilitates information exchange in IT or related fields in North America and Greater China.The ACSIP is committed to promoting leadership and entrepreneurship through our events and member services.
