Lab Representatives

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About the Lab Reps

Lab Reps are a point of contact to facilitate communication between/among students, interns, postdocs, faculty staff, as well as to enhance student involvement in decision-making processes.

The Lab Reps are elected every year by the students at Mila. While the specific initiatives undertaken by Lab Reps vary each year, depending on current context and interest of the members, they are always working to improve the Mila community.

Some of the Lab Reps roles and responsibilities include:

  • Supporting students (channeling feedback / helping solve problems)
  • Providing feedback on Information Technology infrastructure (clusters, wifi, etc.)
  • Managing social activities (reading groups, tea talks, socials)
  • Managing physical spaces (relaxation room, student lounge)
  • Discussing issues around Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
  • Developing conflict resolution procedures
  • Voicing opinion about prospective partnerships
  • Voicing opinion about AI for Humanity research projects

Students in need of advice or resources are welcome and encouraged to reach out to the Lab Reps at any time: reps@mila.quebec

Meet the 2022-23 Lab Reps

Alexandra (Sasha) Volokhova

I am interested in developing intelligent systems applying them for socially important problems, such as drug discovery and climate change mitigation. I have a strong belief that we can make our society more sustainable and fairer with education, science, and open-mindedness.

Fun Fact: I have a professional degree in floral design and enjoy drawing nature in my free time.

Mattie Tesfaldet

My research interests cover topics in computer vision and machine learning, with an emphasis on deep learning. Specifically, I am interested in generative models for content creation, computational creativity, differentiable image parameterizations, differentiable self-organizing systems, and anything else relating to processing signals in interesting and useful ways.

Fun Fact: Like one of our previous members, I also hosted a radio show in TiohtiĆ :ke/MontrĆ©al. It was at n10.as (pronounced ā€œantennasā€) and it was called Focal Point. I also have an identical twin and yes we can read each otherā€™s minds (kidding).

Mats L. Richter

  • Pronouns : He/Him
  • Ethnicity : German
  • Program : PostDoc @ UdeM
  • Contact : mats-leon.richter@mila.quebec

I started my academic career in 2012, studying cognitive science and computer science. During my Master-program at the University of OsnabrĆ¼ck and during my PhD I worked full-time in multiple Start-Ups and freelanced as a data scientist and consultant. My PhD-research focused on the pain points of neural architecture design and development I encountered while working in the industry and leading teams of data scientists. After graduating with Summa Cum Laude in April 2022 from my PhD-program I started my PostDoc at Mila in August of the same year.

Zhaocheng Zhu

  • Pronouns: He/Him
  • Ethnicity: Chinese
  • Program: PhD @ UdeM
  • Contact: zhuzhaoc@mila.quebec

My current research focuses on graph representation learning and knowledge graph reasoning. I also lead the development of TorchDrug, an ML library for drug discovery. I am broadly interested in anything that involves CS algorithms, scalability and systematic generalization.

Fun fact: I am an artist at heart, which drives me to create fancy photo artworks and code bases.

Muawiz Chaudhary

  • Pronouns: They/He
  • Ethnicity: Punjabi American
  • Research Masters @ Concordia
  • Contact : Muawiz.Chaudhary@mila.quebec

Bad boy cheerleader of Mila. Started out by workin on Scattering Transforms, Few Shot, and a bit of distributed learning in my liberal arts undergrad, now my research is primarily on Test Time Adaptation with Batchnorms. Recently I have also done some student ā€˜activismā€™/ā€™organizinā€™ with large scale generative models motivated by a lens of critical legal theory. If ya got any issues, concerns, comments, make me do my job and DM me on my favorite social media platform; Slack!

Fun Fact: Imma Cali Boy, born n raised in the bay area, a product of the dot com boom. My parents are from West Punjab in modern day Pakistan, and my grandparents and the people before them are from East Punjab, modern day India, from our ancestral village of Ambala, loosely translated as ā€œMango villageā€. No surprise that I love mangoes!

Subhrajyoti Dasgupta

  • Pronouns: He/Him
  • Ethnicity : Indian
  • Prof. Masters
  • Contact : subhrajyoti.dasgupta@umontreal.ca

Iā€™ve previously spent some time researching areas in Audio-visual Learning and Computer Vision. I am interested in making vision systems more robust in understanding scenes holistically by learning relationships between different entities, especially for long-range scenes.Ā 

Fun fact: Iā€™m into photography (check some of my works here) and I have a big collection of movies, from Kurosawa to Ray, from Kubrick to Scorsese. Probably thatā€™s what entices me more towards computer vision. šŸ˜‰

Beheshteh T. Rakhshan

  • Pronouns: She/Her
  • Ethnicity: Persian (Iranian)
  • Program: PhD @ Udem
  • Contact: rakhshab@mila.quebec

I am a second year PhD student in the theory group at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO). My research interests lie in the theoretical foundations of machine learning, particularly Randomized algorithms and Tensor Decompositions. After I lost my mom to Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC), I am interested in working on AI for breast cancer and breast cancer awareness. I believe that science and education are the light of the humankind journey in this world.Ā 

Fun Fact: I am an animal lover. We have a cute small dog. Her name is Jessi, she is 10 years old and she was only 3 months when we got her.Ā 

Vishal Gupta

  • Pronouns: he/him
  • Ethnicity: Indian
  • Program: Professional Masters
  • Contact: vishal.gupta@mila.quebec

After spending four years at Indian product companies, applying NLP techniques and statistical models to accelerate sales and marketing processes, I decided to take a break to explore other areas of AI. Iā€™m particularly intrigued by the applications of reinforcement learning in gaming but do I enjoy the applied side of AI more than the theoretical. I also enjoy going out for runs on sunny days and watching random Seinfeld episodes over a big bowl of salad (or mulligatawny soup, iykyk).Ā 

Fun Fact: I learnt how to cook and bake over the COVID lockdown and now love it more than anything. So when Iā€™m not serving transformers over APIs, you might just find me serving Butter Chicken over Basmati.

Sophie Xhonneux

I am a PhD student with Jian Tang working on Graph Neural Networks and Reasoning, in particular Algorithmic reasoning. I am also a Mental Health First Aider.

Fun fact: I am addicted to cheesecake.

Roy Eyono

  • Pronouns: he/himĀ 
  • Ethnicity: Black
  • Program: PhD
  • Contact: roy.eyono@mila.quebec

I am a 3rd year PhD student at McGill with Blake Richards, working at the intersection of neuroscience and deep learning. I am passionate about advancing humanity through artificial intelligence and championing the Canadian startup ecosystem. I am originally from South Africa and Cameroon, which fuels my passion for tackling social problems through disruptive technologies and startups. When not doing research or engaging in the startup ecosystem, I thoroughly enjoy playing guitar and playing soccer & tennis!

Fun Fact: I am a big fan of Congolese Rumba and growing up, I nerded out on the history of Congolese Rumba. My friends often consider me as somewhat of an armchair historian when it comes to Congolese music.

Gabriela Moisescu-Pareja

  • Pronouns: she/her
  • Ethnicity: Romanian/Peruvian
  • Program: Computer Science MSc @ McGill
  • Contact: moisescg@mila.quebec

I’m a Master’s student at McGill, with an undergrad degree in pure math and CS. I’m interested in hierarchical reinforcement learning, the theoretical foundations (and science of) deep learning, emergent phenomena in machine learning, and ML applied to scientific discovery. Previously, I was an ML research engineer at Valence Discovery, an intern at Google keeping users secure, and a research intern in various subfields of ML and statistics.Ā  I’m interested in all things at the intersection of math, computation, physics and biology. Please reach out if you have esoteric interests related to any of these fields! I enjoy nerding out by taking random walks through new topics, perfecting cooking recipes and meeting new people. šŸ™‚

Fun Fact: Last year I went from absolute noob at skiing (beginner slopes) to going down double black diamonds out in the Rockies after a handful of ski trips. Looking forward to hitting them again this season!