Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Affiliate Member

Associate Professor, University of Calgary, Deparment of Electrical and Software Engineering

Adjunct Professor, École de technologie suprérieure, School of Computer Science

Adjunct Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science

Research Topics

Computer Vision

Deep Learning

Medical Machine Learning

Multimodal Learning

Natural Language Processing

Reinforcement Learning

Representation Learning

Website

Google Scholar

Biography

Samira is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary in the Schulich School of Engineering. She is also an Adjunct Professor at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) in the Department of Software Engineering and Information Technology and McGill University in the School of Computer Science. She is an academic member of Mila - Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Samira received her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Polytechnique Montréal/Mila with an award for the best thesis in the department. Samira also worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the McGill School of Computer Science and as a Researcher at Microsoft Research Montréal.

Samira and her group work on solving fundamental problems in representation learning for decision making, with a broad focus on explainability, generalization and efficient learning. Her work has been published in top-tier venues, such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ICCV, CVPR, TMLR and CoRL. Samira received the 2024 Early Career Excellence in Research Award from the Schulich School of Engineering. Her impactful work in multi-modal learning was recognized twice by ACM ICMI Ten-Year Technical Impact Awards, 2023 as Runner-up and 2025 as Winner.