RBC Borealis is thrilled to announce the 2024 RBC Borealis Fellowship recipients. Through our RBC Borealis Fellowships program, we aim to advance world-leading research across Canada, guiding exceptional students and helping them achieve their research goals as they pursue graduate degrees in machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) at a Canadian university.
Supporting the Canadian AI community and academic research is at the core of RBC Borealis. One of our key community initiatives, the RBC Borealis Fellowship, strives to encourage new talent to enroll in the AI research institutes and university programs in Canada and, more importantly, convey the message that there is enough support for talent to remain in the country.
RBC Borealis recognizes that Canada's AI and ML research community relies on a robust and diverse workforce. Our RBC Borealis Fellowships, along with other student programs like Let's SOLVE it and the RBC Borealis Research Internships, reflect our continued dedication to strengthening the student communities in Canada and nurturing them during their journey to become the country’s next generation of AI talent,
Dr. Eirene Seiradaki
Director of Research Partnerships at RBC Borealis
Our 2023 Fellowships have been awarded to ten talented researchers from across Canada. The fellows are supported by distinguished Canadian faculty from a variety of universities, such as Dr. Hsiu-Chin-Lin and Steve X. Liu from McGill, Dr. Hugo Larochelle, Dr. Aaron Courville, and Dr. Ioannis Mitliagkas from the University of Montreal. Dr. Brenda Andrews, Dr. Jimmy Ba, Dr. Alec Jacobson, and Dr. Sanja Fidler from the University of Toronto. Additionally, Dr. Arash Mohammadi from Concordia, Dr. Xianta Jiang from Memorial University, Dr. Mark Schmidt from the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Lingling Jin from the University of Saskatchewan are also part of the students’ advisory committees.
The research areas of the fellows cover a broad range of topics, including Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control for Robotics, Utilizing the Spatiotemporal Information of Videos for Deep Self-Supervised Learning, Trustworthy ML and more.
Receiving the fellowship has dramatically enhanced my research career in AI. It serves as evidence of how such opportunities can positively impact anyone pursuing excellence in machine learning,
Elahe Rahimian Najafabadi
Research Engineer at RBC Borealis and 2020 RBC Borealis Fellow
The RBC Borealis 2023 Fellowships have been awarded to:
Elham Daneshmand
Faculty: Dr. Hsiu-Chin-Lin
Research topic: Combination of Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control for Robotics
Jingjing Zheng
Faculty: Dr. Xianta Jiang.
Research topic: Low-rank recovery, sparse representation learning, and optimization-inspired interpretable deep neural networks
Hattie Zhou
Faculty: Dr. Hugo Larochelle and Dr. Aaron Courville
Research topic: Understanding and improving generalization in deep learning
Haolun Wu
Faculty: Dr. Steve X. Liu
Research topic: Knowledge storage and retrieval, Recommender systems, Trustworthy ML
Anastasia Razdaibiedina
Faculty: Dr. Brenda Andrews and Dr. Jimmy Ba
Research topic: Large Language Models, representation learning and their applications to biological data
Ryan D’Orazio
Faculty: Dr. Ioannis Mitliagkas
Research topic: Optimization theory for machine learning and decision-making
Frederik Kunstner
Faculty: Dr. Mark Schmidt
Research topic: Optimization theory for machine learning
Zohreh Hajiakhondi Meybodi
Faculty: Dr. Arash Mohammadi
Research topic: Deep Neural Networks for Indoor Localization and Wireless Networks
Keyhan Najafian
Faculty: Dr. Lingling
Research topic: Utilizing the Spatiotemporal Information of Videos for Deep Self-Supervised Learning
Towaki Takikawa
Faculty: Dr. Alec Jacobson and Dr. Sanja Fidler
Research topic: Generating, compressing, and transporting 3D multimedia with neural fields
About the RBC Borealis Fellowships
These fellowships are part of RBC Borealis’s commitment to support Canadian academic excellence in AI and Machine Learning. The program offers financial support to exceptional domestic and international graduate students pursuing their Masters and PhDs in different AI fields for fundamental research. This initiative is part of RBC Borealis’s effort to strengthen the partnership between academia and industry and elevate Canada’s leadership in the AI space.
The new cycle of Fellowship applications for the next academic year will open this October. Please refer to our site for details and information about applying to our Graduate Fellowship program.
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