Last Updated: July 2024

PhD Students:

Jiuding Yang

Yakun Yu

Jerry Chen

Keith G. Mills

Shengyao Lu

Qikai Lu

Liyao Jiang

Adel Ameri

Ruichen Chen

Amirhosein Ghasemabadi

Linxuan Zhang

MSc Students:

Juxin Fa
Hongxuan Liu

Haoyu Chen

Mohammadali Shakerdargah

Ruiqing Tian

Mohammadamin Samadi Khoshkho

Kunlin Zhang (MSc 2023) affiliated with Huawei

Chenglin Li (PhD 2023) affiliated with HONOR

Mingjun Zhao (PhD 2023) affiliated with Tencent

Shan Lu (MSc 2021) affiliated with Huawei

Bang Liu (PhD 2020) joined in Sep. 2013 as a Master’s student and got his PhD degree in January 2020. He got his Bachelor degree from the Department of EEIS, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Bang did research on natural Language processing, text mining, matrix completion, network modeling and recommender systems, and spatial data mining. He is affiliated with the Department of CS, University of Montreal, as an Assistant Professor since Fall 2020.

Yaochen Hu (PhD 2019) joined in January, 2013 and got his PhD degree in September 2019. He got his Bachelor degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2012. During his PhD studies, he did research in the areas of distributed machine learning, cloud computing, storage and distributed systems. He is now affiliated with Huawei Montreal Research Center.

Rui Zhu (PhD 2018) was a PhD student in the group from September 2014 to  December 2018. He obtained his master’s degree from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 2014. He enjoys elegant mathematical theory, especially their applications to enhancing system performance. He worked on using tools from optimization, graph theory, and information theory to design algorithms for large-scale distributed machine learning and statistical machine learning systems. He is currently affiliated with DeepMind, Montreal.

Tong Mo (MSc 2020) was in the group from 2018 to January 2020. He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2017. Tong worked on neural architecture search for speech processing. Tong is currently affiliated with Huawei, Edmonton.

Fred X. Han (MSc 2019) was in the group from September 2017 to September 2019. He received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta in 2017. He worked on natural language processing and generative deep learning models. He is currently affiliated with Huawei, Edmonton.

Ting Zhang (MSc 2018) was an MSc student in the group from September, 2016 to September, 2018. She received her Bachelor degree in Information Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2016. She is worked on text data mining and natural language processing. In her spare time, she enjoys playing Sudoku and chess. She is currently a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, Vancouver.

Soham Sinha (MSc 2016) was an MSc student in the Computing Science Department at University of Alberta from September 2014 to June 2016. He was co-supervised by Dr. Niu and Dr. Paul Lu from the CS department. Before coming here, he had completed his Bachelor of Engineering in CS from BESU, Shibpur, India and worked in Ericsson for two years. His thesis was about improving the performance of cloud storage services from a client point of view. Soham is now a PhD student at Boston University.

Yushi Wang (MSc 2017) was an MSc student in the group from September 2015-September 2017. Yushi received his B.Eng. degree from ECE department of University of Alberta in 2012. Before joining the group, Yushi had years of industrial working experience on mobile applications development as a full-stack software engineer. He is currently workin for SAP, Vancouver.

Borislav Mavrin (MSc 2017) was co-supervised by Dr. Linglong Kong and Dr. Niu. He was an MSc student in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences from 2015- 2017. Borislav had a background in mathematical economics, mathematical physics and statistical machine learning.

Dashun Wang (MSc 2016) was an MSc student in the group from Sep 2014 to Sep 2016, co-supervised by Prof. Niu and Prof. Huazhou Li in the Department of Civil Engineering. He obtained his Bachelor degree in Physical Chemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). His thesis was on using statistical learning techniques to predict oil production in petroleum reservoir engineering. Dashun is a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, Vancouver now.

Haolan Chen (MSc 2016) was an MSc student in the group from Sep 2014 to Sep 2016, co-supervised by Dr. Niu and Dr. Masoud Ardakani. He received his B.Eng. degree from Chu Kochen College, Zhejiang University, in 2014. During his Master’s studies, he worked on developing the next-generation personalized video recommender systems. His innovation was deployed at Tencent and improved the click through rate (CTR) of the video recommender in Tencent QQ Browser mobile app by 23% as compared to state-of-the-art methods, and can handle large amounts of implicit feedback data. Haolan is now working at Tencent, Shenzhen, China.

Xu Zhang (MSc 2015) worked on multi-resource allocation for multiple users in the cloud environment and graduated in 2015. Before joining the group, he obtained his Bachelor degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Xu is now a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, Vancouver.

Yan Liu (MSc 2014) worked on enhancing the performance of parallel computing environments and graduated with an MSc degree in 2014. Before joining the group, she was a Software Development Engineer at the Intel Corporation in Shanghai, China. Yan is currently working as a Software Engineer at Amazon, Toronto.