Richard Zemel

Richard Zemel is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. He holds the Google/NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Machine Learning and is a Canada CIFAR Artificial Intelligence Chair. His research focuses on foundational aspects of machine learning, including unsupervised learning, representation learning, few-shot learning, and ethical AI concerns like fairness and privacy. He co-founded SmartFinance, a financial tech startup, and developed the Toronto Paper Matching System used in major conferences like NIPS and ICML.

Education: BSc in History & Science from Harvard University (1984), PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (1993).

Research Interests: Machine Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Probabilistic Models, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Fairness in AI.

Awards:

• NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award
• Young Investigator Award (Office of Naval Research)
• Presidential Scholar Award
• NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplements
• CIFAR Fellow

Affiliations: Senior Fellow at Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Co-Chief of Machine Learning at Rotman School of Business' Creative Destruction Lab, and Chief Scientist at Vector Institute for AI.