Frank Wood

Frank Wood is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at AMII. He directs the Pacific Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence (PLAI) research group and co-founded Inverted AI, a spin-out focused on advanced simulation for autonomous vehicles. His research focuses on probabilistic programming, deep generative models, and reinforcement learning, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and vision.

Wood teaches courses such as Machine Learning and Data Mining (CPSC 340) and Topics in Artificial Intelligence (CPSC 532W). He has been on academic leave from January to December 2025. His work integrates theoretical advancements with practical applications, including projects like PLAICraft, a large-scale embodied AI dataset.

Key awards include the ICML Best Paper Honourable Mention and contributions to probabilistic programming systems like Anglican. His research group collaborates on tools such as TorchDriveEnv for autonomous driving benchmarking and explores cutting-edge methods in diffusion models and continual learning.