$2.34 million for UBC Computer Science in NSERC Discovery Grants

NSERC Discovery Grants have been announced for 12 UBC Computer Science researchers, totalling $2.34 million over five years for various projects.

Half of the recipients (six) are new to the department within the past two years, bringing a variety of new talent and exciting new areas of research. The projects receiving grants are in areas ranging from AI to natural language processing, bioinformatics, machine learning, privacy and security, and more.

The NSERC Discovery Grants program serves to support ongoing programs of research with long-term goals rather than a single short-term project or collection of projects. These grants recognize the creativity and innovation that are at the heart of all research advances, providing long-term operating funds and can facilitate access to funding from other programs but are not meant to support the full costs of a research program.

"Discovery is the foundation of all advancements,” said The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. “Through this major investment in some of Canada's most promising and innovative researchers, we are supporting scientists and students to become global leaders in their field. By helping to expand the frontiers of science, we are investing in a better society and a brighter future for Canadians.”

Projects and grant recipients in UBC CS:

Computational methods involving differential equations in computer graphics, machine learning and inference problems: Uri Ascher

AI-Generating Algorithms: AI that improves itself by automatically creating learning challenges: Jeffrey Clune

Toward Personalized Explainable AI: Cristina Conati

Uncovering the latent structure in single-cell multi-omics data to study human diseases: Jiarui Ding

Uncertainty in Geometric Graphs: William Evans

Towards practical, end-to-end differentially private machine learning: Mathias Lecuyer

Improving Software Quality through Effective Decision Support: Gail Murphy

Turning an enemy into an ally: Privacy In Machine Learning (Pri-ML): Mijung Park

Next Generation Provenance-based Intrusion Detection System: Thomas Pasquier

Computational Methods for Single Cell Biology: Andrew Roth

Hyper-fast hyper-parameter tuning for the next generation of machine learning: Mark Schmidt

Commonsense Reasoning in Natural Language Processing: Vered Shwartz