Rafid Mahmood

Rafid Mahmood is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa's Telfer School of Management, with a part-time role as Sr. Research Scientist at NVIDIA Toronto AI Lab. He holds a BASc, MASc, and PhD in Electrical and Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto.

• Educations: B.A.Sc. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering, M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering (University of Toronto)

His research focuses on predictive/prescriptive decision-making models and data-centric pipelines for AI systems, targeting applications in healthcare, autonomous vehicles, and generative AI. Key areas include optimizing data collection, inverse optimization, and bridging simulation-to-real gaps in machine learning.

Recent Research Trends: His work emphasizes balancing data quality/cost (e.g., crowd-informed annotation), enhancing vision-language model robustness, and scalable training strategies for large models. He also explores pricing dynamics in generative AI markets and healthcare logistics optimization.

• Funded Projects:
  • CIHR Grant (2024-2029): $1.45M for AI-driven cardiac arrest prediction in hospitals
  • NSERC Discovery Grant (2023-2028): $160K for data-centric AI frameworks
  • SSHRC Insight Grant (2023): $68K for synthetic data in labor markets
• Labs/Teams: Leads projects at NVIDIA Toronto AI Lab and collaborates with the Vector Institute. Active in organizing workshops like Exploring the Next Generation of Data (CVPR 2025).