Research Expertise

 

Scientific Director

Raymond T Ng

Professor | Computer Science
Chief Informatics Officer | PROOF (Prevention of Organ Failure) Centre
Canada Research Chair in Data Science and Analytics

Raymond’s main research area for the past two decades is on data mining, with a specific focus on health informatics and text mining. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed publications on data clustering, outlier detection, OLAP processing, health informatics and text mining. He is the recipient of two best paper awards – from the 2001 ACM SIGKDD conference, the premier data mining conference in the world, and the 2005 ACM SIGMOD conference, one of the top database conferences worldwide. For the past decade, he has co-led several large-scale genomic projects funded by Genome Canada, Genome BC and industrial collaborators. Since the inception of the PROOF Centre of Excellence, which focuses on biomarker development for end-stage organ failures, he has held the position of the Chief Informatics Officer of the Centre. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Ng was the associate director of the NSERC-funded strategic network on business intelligence.

More about Raymond Ng

Departmental Website

Affiliated Faculty Members

Ali Ameli

Assistant Professor | Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

Ali is a hydrologist interested in exploring how water and solutes move and react within watersheds, how these movements and reactions change with climate variability and land-use alteration, and ultimately how these changes impact terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Specifically, the research areas include: ​groundwater ecohydrology, hydro-geological engineering, watershed management, applied hydro-geochemistry, groundwater - surfacewater & land interaction, and green infrastructure.

Departmental Website

Ivan Beschastnikh

Associate Professor | Computer Science

I have broad research interests that usually touch on systems and software engineering. My current projects span distributed systems, formal methods, networks, and security. I enjoy building and studying real software systems and tend to be empirical in my research.

Departmental Website

Tom Blydt-Hansen

Associate Professor | Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine

Improving health outcomes for pediatric patients that receive kidney transplants. Development and validation of biomarkers (e.g., metabolites and chemokines in urine) for rapid, real-time monitoring of kidney function.

Institute Website

Alexandre Bouchard-Cote

Associate Professor | Statistics

Alexandre’s main field of research is in statistical machine learning. He is interested in the mathematical side of the subject as well as in applications in linguistics and biology. On the methodology side, he is interested in Monte Carlo methods, graphical models, non-parametric Bayesian statistics, randomized algorithms and variational inference. His favorite applications, both in linguistics and biology, are related to phylogenetics. Some examples of recent studies include: automated reconstruction of proto-languages; cancer phylogenetics; population genetics; and pedigrees, tree and alignment inference.

Departmental Website

Trevor Campbell

Assistant Professor | Statistics

Trevor's research focuses on automated, scalable Bayesian inference algorithms, Bayesian nonparametrics, streaming data, and Bayesian theory.

Personal Homepage

Giuseppe Carenini

Professor | Computer Science

Giuseppe has broad interdisciplinary interests. His research focuses on how natural language processing and information visualization can be effectively combined to support data analysis and decision making. More specifically, he has been working on mining and summarization of conversational data (emails, meetings, blogs); discourse parsing; the generation and summarization of evaluative text; and visual text analytic techniques for opinions and conversations.

Departmental Website

Christopher Carlsten

Professor | Department of Medicine

Chris is interested in the effects of occupational and environmental exposure on respiratory diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, and pleural disease. His laboratory leverages the power of controlled human exposure methodology and high-dimensional molecular analysis to focus on the respiratory and immunological health effects of inhaled environmental and occupational threats, using diesel exhaust, western red cedar, and phthalates as model inhalants. Chris is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Occupational and Environmental Lung Disease.

Lab Website

Artem Cherkasov

Professor | Vancouver Prostate Centre, Urologic Sciences

Artem is interested in developing new therapies to treat prostate cancer and other diseases. Specifically, his work focuses on computer-aided drug design, employing artificial intelligence in structure-activity modeling, drug reprofiling, and development of novel cheminformatics and bioinformatics tools.

Departmental Website

Gabriela Cohen-Freue

Associate Professor | Statistics

Gabriela works in statistical problems that usually appear in the analysis of proteomics and genomics data. In these applications, some variables may be measured with error; the number of features is much larger than the number of observations; the observations are not always independent; and outliers are present in the data. Gabriela develops statistical and computational methods to address some of these common issues in statistical genomics. In particular, she is interested in the development of robust estimation methods for sparse linear models. Gabriela is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Statistical Proteomics.

Departmental Website

Cristina Conati

Professor | Computer Science

Cristina’s research integrates research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Cognitive Science to create intelligent interactive systems that can learn and adapt to the needs of their individual users, in order to delivery highly personalize interaction experiences. Recent examples of Cristina's research include creating serious e-games that can adapt to both a user's cognitive and affective states, learning effective user's interaction behaviors from data, and leveraging eye-tracking for user modeling

Departmental Website

Thalia Soshana Field

Assistant Professor | Department of Medicine, Neurology

Dr. Field is a stroke neurologist with research interests in clinical trials, thrombosis, and patient-centered post-stroke outcomes including cognition, pain and quality of life. She is also interested in patient care of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients and is exploring the use of machine learning algorithms to detect and alleviate distressed states in patients stricken with AD.

Departmental Website

Michael Friedlander

Professor | Computer Science and Mathematics

Michael’s research focuses on solving large-scale optimization problems, and spans algorithm design, analysis, and software implementation. His work includes applications in signal processing and machine learning.

Departmental Website

Amanda Giang

Assistant Professor| IRES and Department of Mechanical Engineering

Amanda is an environmental scientist interested in applying interdisciplinary research methods that involve data and models to inform policy-decision-making, with a specific focus on air pollution and toxic chemicals.

Personal Website

Daniel Goldowitz

Professor | Medical Genetics

Dr. Goldowitz's research interest is in how genetic information that control early development of the nervous system can cause neurodegenerative disease and brain disorders in children and adults. A major focus of his work is the application of molecular and bioinformatic technologies to study the entire gene regulatory network of the cerebellum, which is an area of the brain that is linked to autism, schizophrenia, mental retardation, and other brain disorders.

Departmental Website

Kendall Ho

Professor | Department of Emergency Medicine, Faculty of Medicine

Kendall is a practicing emergency medicine specialist and lead Digital Emergency Medicine. His academic and research interests focuses on using digital technologies to improve healthcare delivery and raising digital health literacy. Examples of his research include using home sensors and wearables for remote patient monitoring, virtual health, social media for interprofessional communication and multicultural public engagement, and evidence informed policy translation in digital health.

Digital Emergency Medicine website

Nadja Kunz

Assistant Professor | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs

Dr. Kunz's current research focuses on the mining and extractives sector at two geographical scales of analysis: (1) within the mine lease, and (2) within mining regions. At the mine site level, Nadja develops novel engineering models to improve quantification of water risk, and investigates organizational constraints to implementing optimal system-level solutions. At the regional level, Nadja studies the evolving role of the mining sector in water stewardship and governance. She is especially interested in how mining can best contribute towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG6 which focuses on the provision of water and sanitation.

Departmental Website

Laks Lakshmanan

Professor | Computer Science

Laks' research interests span a wide spectrum of topics in Database Systems and related areas, including: relational and object-oriented databases, advanced data models for novel applications, OLAP and data warehousing, database mining, data integration, semi-structured data and XML, directory-enabled networks, querying the WWW, information and social networks and social media, recommender systems, and personalization. A common theme underlying his research is to model problems not traditionally viewed as standard data management problems and bring the technology of efficient data management and mining to bear on them, thus pushing the frontiers of technology.

Departmental Website

Tamara Munzner

Professor | Computer Science

Tamara's research interests include the development, evaluation, and characterization of information visualization systems and techniques. She has worked in a broad range of application domains, including genomics, evolutionary biology, geometric topology, computational linguistics, large-scale system administration, web log analysis, and journalism.

Departmental Website

Homayoun Najjaran

Professor | Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Najjaran's research focuses on the analysis and design of mechatronics and control systems with broad applications including unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, industrial automation and microelectromechanical systems. Over the past decade, he and his students have contributed to multiple aspects of safe and reliable operation of robots through computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.

Advanced Control & Intelligent Systems Laboratory

Darko Odic

Assistant Professor | Psychology

Dr. Odic's research interests includes cognitive development, language acquisition, psychophysics, cognition/semantics interface, number and quantity representations. He is a member of the Early Development Research Group at UBC, which is interested in the development of language, learning, and social understanding in infants and children.

Departmental Website

Christoph Ortner

Professor | Mathematics

Nowadays, I spend most of my time on hybrid mechanistic/machine-learned interaction models for atoms and molecules, but am interested in many other topics as well (visit my homepage). My research on this topic straddles rigorous analysis and numerical analysis, scientific computing (algorithms), modelling and applications primarily in molecular modelling (usually with collaborators). Topics: Molecular simulation, Machine learning and coarse-graining Atomistic-continuum-quantum multi-scale methods, Crystal defects, Fracture mechanics, Numerical analysis, PDEs

Departmental Website

Ipek Oruk

Associate Professor | Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences

We study visual recognition of high level forms such as faces, letters and objects. Our purpose is to advance the understanding of the brain mechanisms and processes responsible for visual recognition. We investigate the nature of neural computations that support normal high-level visual function as well as the disruptions to these that result in visual impairments.

Homepage

Yaniv Plan

Assistant Professor | Mathematics

Yaniv studies the mathematics of information, with a focus on compressed sensing and low-rank matrix recovery. He has a recent interest in deep learning. Much of his work studies the role of randomness in the analysis of high-dimensional data.

Website

Anoush Poursartip

Professor | Materials Engineering

Anoush's main area of research relates to the design and development of polymer matrix composite materials. Specifically, the two most important areas of concern are damage growth in service and processing science for efficient manufacturing. He is addressing these by combining both experimental and theoretical approaches. He has established very good experimental and numerical modelling facility, with good industrial and government contacts. Anoush is the Director of the Composites Research Network at UBC and Co-Director of Composites Knowledge Network NCE.

Departmental Website

Loren Rieseberg

Professor | Botany

Loren’s lab employs a combination of ecological, genomic, and bioinformatics approaches to study the origin and evolution of new species, exploits the genetic diversity of wild extremophile species for crop improvement, and combats invasive weeds, focusing on members of the sunflower family.

Departmental Website

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