1. ‘Fundamentals on Deep Learning’
by Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His research focuses on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pragmatics, with a goal to innovate more equitable, efficient, and `social’ machines for improved human health, safer social networking, and reduced information overload. Applications of his work currently span a wide range of speech and language understanding and generation tasks. For example, his group works on language models, automatic speech processing, machine translation, and computational socio-pragmatics in social media. Dr. Abdul-Mageed has published over 85 research papers in top venues such as AAAI, ACL, EACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and ICWSM. His lab has won several international competitions, including in machine translation, dialect processing, and social meaning understanding. Dr. Abdul-Mageed’s research has been supported with over $9M by AMD, Google, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Canadian Foundation for Innovation.
2. ‘Multilevel Models’
by Dr. Sabrina Thai
Sabrina Thai is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brock University. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto and completed a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. Broadly, she is interested in how other people influence how individuals perceive themselves, their relationships, and those closest to them by examining social comparisons that occur in the context of close relationships. More specifically, she is interested in the interpersonal consequences of social comparisons that occur at various levels of the relationships: comparisons that occur within relationships (i.e., between romantic partners or friends), comparisons that occur between relationships, and comparisons that occur both within and between relationships (i.e., when individuals close others to other individuals: comparing child to another person, comparing partner to another person). She is also interested in how psychological phenomena unfold in daily life, which has led to a fourth line of research focused on developing innovative research methods and tools to study social behaviour, such as ExperienceSampler, an open source scaffold for developing custom experience sampling smartphone apps.
3. ‘Structural Equation Models’
by Dr. Joanne Chung
Joanne M. Chung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. In her research, she seeks to understand how one’s cultural milieu, self-concept, and emotional life interact to shape individual differences during important life transitions. Joanne is interested in the measurement of personality processes; she also especially values exploratory, descriptive, and transparent research.