Portrait of Tegan Maharaj

Tegan Maharaj

Core Academic Member
Assistant Professor in Machine Learning, HEC Montréal, Department of Decision Science
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Dynamical Systems
Machine Learning Theory
Multimodal Learning
Representation Learning

Biography

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Decision Science at HEC Montréal.

The goal of my research is to contribute understanding and techniques to the growing science of responsible AI development, while usefully applying AI to high-impact ecological problems related to climate change, epidemiology, AI alignment and ecological impact assessments. My recent research has two themes: (1) using deep models for policy analysis and risk mitigation, and (2) designing data or unit test environments to empirically evaluate learning behaviour or simulate the deployment of AI systems. Please contact me if you are interested in collaborations in these areas.

I am generally interested in studying “what goes into” deep models—not only data, but also the broader learning environment (e.g., task design/specification, loss function and regularization) and the broader societal context of deployment (e.g., privacy considerations, trends and incentives, norms and human biases). I am concerned and passionate about AI ethics and safety, and the application of ML to environmental management, health and social welfare.

Current Students

Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - HEC Montréal
PhD - HEC Montréal

Publications

Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision for Stylized Opinion Summarization
Reinald Kim
Mirella Lapata. 2020
Un-611
Maxinder S. Kan-620
Somnath Basu
Roy Chowdhury
Chao Zhao
Tanya Goyal
Junyi Jiacheng Xu
Jessy Li
Ivor W. Tsang
James T. Kwok
Neil Houlsby
Andrei Giurgiu
Stanisław Jastrzębski … (see 22 more)
Bruna Morrone
Quentin de Laroussilhe
Mona Gesmundo
Attariyan Sylvain
Gelly
Thomas Wolf
Lysandre Debut
Julien Victor Sanh
Clement Chaumond
Anthony Delangue
Pier-339 Moi
Tim ric Cistac
R´emi Rault
Morgan Louf
Funtow-900 Joe
Sam Davison
Patrick Shleifer
Von Platen
Clara Ma
Yacine Jernite
Julien Plu
Canwen Xu
Opinion summarization research has primar-001 ily focused on generating summaries reflect-002 ing important opinions from customer reviews 0… (see more)03 without paying much attention to the writing 004 style. In this paper, we propose the stylized 005 opinion summarization task, which aims to 006 generate a summary of customer reviews in 007 the desired (e.g., professional) writing style. 008 To tackle the difficulty in collecting customer 009 and professional review pairs, we develop a 010 non-parallel training framework, Noisy Pair-011 ing and Partial Supervision ( NAPA ), which 012 trains a stylized opinion summarization sys-013 tem from non-parallel customer and profes-014 sional review sets. We create a benchmark P RO - 015 S UM by collecting customer and professional 016 reviews from Yelp and Michelin. Experimental 017 results on P RO S UM and FewSum demonstrate 018 that our non-parallel training framework con-019 sistently improves both automatic and human 020 evaluations, successfully building a stylized 021 opinion summarization model that can gener-022 ate professionally-written summaries from cus-023 tomer reviews. 024
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Priya L. Donti
Lynn H. Kaack
Kelly Kochanski
Alexandre Lacoste
Andrew Slavin Ross
Nikola Milojevic-Dupont
Natasha Jaques
Anna Waldman-Brown
Alexandra Luccioni
Evan David Sherwin
S. Karthik Mukkavilli
Konrad Paul Kording
Carla P. Gomes
Andrew Y. Ng
Demis Hassabis
John C. Platt
Felix Creutzig … (see 2 more)
Jennifer T Chayes
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning (ML) experts, may wonder how we can help. Here… (see more) we describe how ML can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where existing gaps can be filled by ML, in collaboration with other fields. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the ML community to join the global effort against climate change.
Deep Learning for Detecting Extreme Weather Patterns
Mayur Mudigonda
Mayur Mudigonda, Prabhat Ram
Prabhat Ram
Karthik Kashinath
Evan Racah
Ankur Mahesh
Yunjie Liu
Jim Biard
Thorsten Kurth
Sookyung Kim
Burlen Loring
Travis O'Brien
K. Kunkel
Kenneth E. Kunkel
M. Wehner
Michael F. Wehner … (see 2 more)
W. Collins
William D. Collins
Predicting Infectiousness for Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
gaetan caron
satya ortiz gagne
Bernhard Schölkopf … (see 3 more)
Abhinav Sharma
Andrew Robert Williams
The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly worldwide, overwhelming manual contact tracing in many countries and resulting in widespread lockdo… (see more)wns for emergency containment. Large-scale digital contact tracing (DCT) has emerged as a potential solution to resume economic and social activity while minimizing spread of the virus. Various DCT methods have been proposed, each making trade-offs between privacy, mobility restrictions, and public health. The most common approach, binary contact tracing (BCT), models infection as a binary event, informed only by an individual's test results, with corresponding binary recommendations that either all or none of the individual's contacts quarantine. BCT ignores the inherent uncertainty in contacts and the infection process, which could be used to tailor messaging to high-risk individuals, and prompt proactive testing or earlier warnings. It also does not make use of observations such as symptoms or pre-existing medical conditions, which could be used to make more accurate infectiousness predictions. In this paper, we use a recently-proposed COVID-19 epidemiological simulator to develop and test methods that can be deployed to a smartphone to locally and proactively predict an individual's infectiousness (risk of infecting others) based on their contact history and other information, while respecting strong privacy constraints. Predictions are used to provide personalized recommendations to the individual via an app, as well as to send anonymized messages to the individual's contacts, who use this information to better predict their own infectiousness, an approach we call proactive contact tracing (PCT). We find a deep-learning based PCT method which improves over BCT for equivalent average mobility, suggesting PCT could help in safe re-opening and second-wave prevention.
COVI-AgentSim: an Agent-based Model for Evaluating Methods of Digital Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
Abhinav Sharma
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Andrew Robert Williams
Akshay Patel
gaetan caron
satya ortiz gagne
Yang Zhang
Bernhard Schölkopf
Joanna Merckx
COVI White Paper
Hannah Alsdurf
Prateek Gupta
Daphne Ippolito
Richard Janda
Max Jarvie
Tyler J. Kolody
Sekoul Krastev
Robert Obryk
Dan Pilat
Nasim Rahaman
Jean-franois Rousseau
Abhinav Sharma
Brooke Struck … (see 3 more)
Yun William Yu
COVI White Paper
Hannah Alsdurf
Prateek Gupta
Daphne Ippolito
Richard Janda
Max Jarvie
Tyler J. Kolody
Sekoul Krastev
Robert Obryk
Dan Pilat
Nasim Rahaman
Jean-franois Rousseau
Abhinav Sharma
Brooke Struck … (see 3 more)
Yun William Yu
COVI White Paper
Hannah Alsdurf
Prateek Gupta
Daphne Ippolito
Richard Janda
Max Jarvie
Tyler J. Kolody
Sekoul Krastev
Robert Obryk
Dan Pilat
Nasim Rahaman
Jean-franois Rousseau
Abhinav Sharma
Brooke Struck … (see 3 more)
Yun William Yu
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essen… (see more)tial tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile apps has the potential to shift the paradigm. Some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems, but more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same benefit without concentrating data in the hands of a state authority or for-profit corporations. Machine learning methods can circumvent some of the limitations of standard digital tracing by incorporating many clues and their uncertainty into a more graded and precise estimation of infection risk. The estimated risk can provide early risk awareness, personalized recommendations and relevant information to the user. Finally, non-identifying risk data can inform epidemiological models trained jointly with the machine learning predictor. These models can provide statistical evidence for the importance of factors involved in disease transmission. They can also be used to monitor, evaluate and optimize health policy and (de)confinement scenarios according to medical and economic productivity indicators. However, such a strategy based on mobile apps and machine learning should proactively mitigate potential ethical and privacy risks, which could have substantial impacts on society (not only impacts on health but also impacts such as stigmatization and abuse of personal data). Here, we present an overview of the rationale, design, ethical considerations and privacy strategy of `COVI,' a Covid-19 public peer-to-peer contact tracing and risk awareness mobile application developed in Canada.
Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims
Miles Brundage
Shahar Avin
Haydn Belfield
Gretchen Krueger
Gillian K. Hadfield
Heidy Khlaaf
Jingying Yang
H. Toner
Ruth Catherine Fong
Pang Wei Koh
Sara Hooker
Jade Leung
Andrew John Trask
Emma Bluemke
Jonathan Lebensbold
Cullen C. O'keefe
Mark Koren
Th'eo Ryffel … (see 39 more)
JB Rubinovitz
Tamay Besiroglu
Federica Carugati
Jack Clark
Peter Eckersley
Sarah de Haas
Maritza L. Johnson
Ben Laurie
Alex Ingerman
Igor Krawczuk
Amanda Askell
Rosario Cammarota
A. Lohn
Charlotte Stix
Peter Mark Henderson
Logan Graham
Carina E. A. Prunkl
Bianca Martin
Elizabeth Seger
Noa Zilberman
Sean O hEigeartaigh
Frens Kroeger
Girish Sastry
R. Kagan
Adrian Weller
Brian Shek-kam Tse
Elizabeth Barnes
Allan Dafoe
Paul D. Scharre
Ariel Herbert-Voss
Martijn Rasser
Carrick Flynn
Thomas Krendl Gilbert
Lisa Dyer
Saif M. Khan
Markus Anderljung
COVI White Paper-Version 1.1
Hannah Alsdurf
Prateek Gupta
Daphne Ippolito
Richard Janda
Max Jarvie
Tyler J. Kolody
Sekoul Krastev
Robert Obryk
Dan Pilat
Nasim Rahaman
Jean-franois Rousseau
Abhinav Sharma
Brooke Struck … (see 3 more)
Yun William Yu
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has resulted in significant strain on health care and public health institutions around the world. Contac… (see more)t tracing is an essential tool for public health officials and local communities to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Standard manual contact tracing of people infected with Covid-19, while the current gold standard, has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile applications has the potential to shift the paradigm of Covid-19 community spread. Although some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems through either GPS or Bluetooth, more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same benefit without concentrating data in the hands of a state authority or in for-profit corporations. Additionally, machine learning methods can be used to circumvent some of the limitations of standard digital tracing by incorporating many clues (including medical conditions, self-reported symptoms, and numerous encounters with people at different risk levels, for different durations and distances) and their uncertainty into a more graded and precise estimation of infection and contagion risk. The estimated risk can be used to provide early risk awareness, personalized recommendations and relevant information to the user and connect them to health services. Finally, the non-identifying data about these risks can inform detailed epidemiological models trained jointly with the machine learning predictor, and these models can provide statistical evidence for the interaction and importance of different factors involved in the transmission of the disease. They can also be used to monitor, evaluate and optimize different health policy and confinement/deconfinement scenarios according to medical and economic productivity indicators. However, such a strategy based on mobile apps and machine learning should proactively mitigate potential ethical and privacy risks, which could have substantial impacts on society (not only impacts on health but also impacts such as stigmatization and abuse of personal data). Here, we present an overview of the rationale, design, ethical considerations and privacy strategy of ‘COVI,’ a Covid-19 public peer-to-peer contact tracing and risk awareness mobile application developed in Canada. Addendum 2020-07-14: The government of Canada has declined to endorse COVI and will be promoting a different app for decentralized contact tracing. In the interest of preventing fragmentation of the app landscape, COVI will therefore not be deployed to end users. We are currently still in the process of finalizing the project, and plan to release our code and models for academic consumption and to make them accessible to other States should they wish to deploy an app based on or inspired by said code and models. University of Ottawa, Mila, Université de Montréal, The Alan Turing Institute, University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, McGill University, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, The Decision Lab, HEC Montréal, Max Planck Institute, Libéo, University of Toronto. Corresponding author general: richard.janda@mcgill.ca Corresponding author for public health: abhinav.sharma@mcgill.ca Corresponding author for privacy: ywyu@math.toronto.edu Corresponding author for machine learning: yoshua.bengio@mila.quebec Corresponding author for user perspective: brooke@thedecisionlab.com Corresponding author for technical implementation: jean-francois.rousseau@libeo.com 1 ar X iv :2 00 5. 08 50 2v 2 [ cs .C R ] 2 7 Ju l 2 02 0
Deep Learning recognizes weather and climate patterns
Karthik Kashinath
M. Prabhat
Mayur Mudigonda
Ankur Mahesh
Sookyung Kim
Yunjie Liu
B. Toms
Evan Racah
Jim Biard
K. Kunkel
Dean Nesbit Williams
Travis O'Brien
M. Wehner
W. Collins
A Dataset and Exploration of Models for Understanding Video Data through Fill-in-the-Blank Question-Answering
While deep convolutional neural networks frequently approach or exceed human-level performance in benchmark tasks involving static images, e… (see more)xtending this success to moving images is not straightforward. Video understanding is of interest for many applications, including content recommendation, prediction, summarization, event/object detection, and understanding human visual perception. However, many domains lack sufficient data to explore and perfect video models. In order to address the need for a simple, quantitative benchmark for developing and understanding video, we present MovieFIB, a fill-in-the-blank question-answering dataset with over 300,000 examples, based on descriptive video annotations for the visually impaired. In addition to presenting statistics and a description of the dataset, we perform a detailed analysis of 5 different models predictions, and compare these with human performance. We investigate the relative importance of language, static (2D) visual features, and moving (3D) visual features, the effects of increasing dataset size, the number of frames sampled, and of vocabulary size. We illustrate that: this task is not solvable by a language model alone, our model combining 2D and 3D visual information indeed provides the best result, all models perform significantly worse than human-level. We provide human evaluation for responses given by different models and find that accuracy on the MovieFIB evaluation corresponds well with human judgment. We suggest avenues for improving video models, and hope that the MovieFIB challenge can be useful for measuring and encouraging progress in this very interesting field.