Team

Jian-Yun Nie is full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montreal. He is a member of RALI, the laboratory dedicated to natural language processing at DIRO.

Jian-Yun Nie’s main research area is information retrieval (e.g., search engines) and natural language processing.  His work covers a wide range of topics, including information retrieval models, cross-language information retrieval, query expansion, suggestion and understanding, sentiment analysis, recommender systems, dialogue systems and question answering. Jian-Yun Nie has published more than 200 papers in journals and conferences in this area. He has served as a general chair and PC chair of SIGIR conferences and senior PC member for NLP conferences such as ACL and COLING.

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

He is a Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program as Senior Fellow and acts as Scientific Director of IVADO.

In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2021, became the second most cited computer scientist in the world. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada and Officer of the Order of Canada.

Concerned about the social impact of AI and the objective that AI benefits all, he actively contributed to the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.

Yacine Benahmed is professor in the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering at UQAR. He conducts research in natural language processing, speech recognition and comprehension, as well as metaheuristic optimization algorithms. Among other fields, he specializes in dialog systems. 

Jackie Chi Kit Cheung is an Associate Professor at McGill University's School of Computer Science where he co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, Mila. He is Deputy Scientific Co-Director of the Mila Quebec AI Institute. His research in natural language processing focuses on natural language generation tasks such as automatic summarization, and on integrating diverse sources of knowledge into NLP systems. He is motivated in particular by how the structure of the world can be reflected in the structure of language processing systems.

Samira Ebrahimi-Kahou is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, an associate professor at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), and an adjunct professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University. Ebrahimi Kahou’s current research interests are multimodal learning, reasoning across modalities, metalearning and in general efficient representation learning. She also works on deep learning methods for dialogue systems and humanitarian AI.

Richard Khoury received his bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Laval University (Quebec, QC) in 2002 and 2004 respectively, and his doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, ON ) in 2007. From 2008 to 2016, he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in the Department of Software Engineering at Lakehead University. In 2016, he moved to Université Laval, where he holds the position of associate professor. His research interests are in data mining and natural language processing, and further include knowledge management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Luc Lamontagne is professor at the Departement of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the Université Laval. He is a member of the GRAAL research laboratory and the IID institute, a group of researchers in AI. His research interests lie in text classification, information extraction and question-answering systems.

Philippe Langlais is full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montreal. He is a member of RALI, a laboratory dedicated to natural language processing, where he conducts research in the field of machine translation and information extraction.

Bang Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montreal. He is a core member of the RALI laboratory (Applied Research in Computer Linguistics) of DIRO, as well as an associate member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He received his B.Engr. degree in 2013 from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), as well as his M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree from University of Alberta in 2015 and 2020, respectively. His research interests primarily lie in the areas of natural language processing (NLP), data mining, multimodal and multitask learning.

Amal Zouaq is Full Professor at Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, an IVADO professor and an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Semantic Web, and educational data mining. She is the director of the LAMA-WeST research lab, specialized in several aspects of natural language processing including knowledge extraction from unstructured knowledge sources, knowledge base learning and completion, question answering, and educational data mining.

Siva Reddy is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Linguistics at McGill University working on Natural Language Processing. He is a Facebook CIFAR AI Chair and a core faculty member of Mila. Before McGill, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and a Google PhD fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He received the 2020 VentureBeat AI Innovation Award in NLP for his work in bias in large neural models of language. 

Jian Tang is currently an assistant professor at HEC Montreal and Mila. Prior to that, he was a Postdoc at University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University. He also worked at Microsoft Research Asia as an associate researcher between 2014-2016. His research interests are graph representation learning, graph neural networks, deep generative models, reinforcement learning, knowledge graphs, drug discovery and recommender systems.