Laurent Charlin to head a Canada CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence
April 8, 2019
Laurent Charlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences, is one of a new group of six Canadian researchers to be awarded Canada CIFAR Chairs in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This is the second CIFAR chair to be headed by an HEC Montréal professor. In December 2018, Professor Jian Tang was granted a similar research chair.
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) announced these new appointments on April 8, as part of the Pan-Canadian Strategy on AI. The strategy, with a budget of $125 million, aims to keep Canada at the forefront of research in artificial intelligence.
Professor Charlin, who is affiliated with Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, has been granted five-year funding for his research chair. He is one of the chair holders appointed by CIFAR with the goal of retaining them at Canadian universities and in Canadian industry.
“This appointment is another sign of the value currently being placed on developing AI research in Canada and in Montreal,” says Professor Charlin. “The Chair will allow me to focus more on my research and give me even more research freedom. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”
During his term he will continue work on personalized machine learning, aiming to create systems that can adapt to their users’ tastes and preferences. Specifically, he will delve deeper into three areas:
- Life-long machine learning, i.e. developing models that take account of users’ evolving tastes and can predict their future preferences
- Interactive recommender systems
- Models that optimize recommendations, in particular for sequences of recommendations
About Laurent Charlin
Professor Charlin earned a Master’s degree from the University of Waterloo and a PhD from the University of Toronto and conducted post-doctoral studies at Columbia, Princeton and McGill. His main contributions have been in the field of recommender systems. For example, he co-created the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS), used to recommend and assign papers to reviewers. The system has been adopted by dozens of major conferences in the past five years and has recommended papers to over 6,000 reviewers. He has published over 20 papers at international conferences and won the award for the second-best paper at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) in 2008.
Visit the research site for more information on Professor Charlin’s work.