This year, we are happy to have two wonderful guest lectures by Inmar Givoni, Director of Engineering at Uber Advanced Technology Group, and Yevgeniy Vahlis, Head of BMO AI – Bank of Montreal’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities group. Inmar will be giving a guest lecture on artificial intelligence and machine learning for self-driving cars. Yevgeniy will be giving a guest lecture on applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the financial sector. I want to thank them both on behalf of the class for taking the time out of their busy schedule and graciously accepting my invitation for the guest lectures.
Inmar Givoni is a Director of Engineering at Uber Advanced Technology Group, Toronto, where she leads a team whose mission is to bring from research and into production cutting-edge deep-learning models for self-driving vehicles. She received her PhD (Computer Science) in 2011 from the University of Toronto, specializing in machine learning, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. She worked at Microsoft Research, Altera (now Intel), Kobo, and Kindred at roles ranging from research scientist to VP, Big Data, applying machine learning techniques to various problem domains and taking concepts from research to production systems. She is an inventor of several patents and has authored numerous top-tier academic publications in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology. She is a regular speaker at AI events, and is particularly interested in outreach activities for young women, encouraging them to choose technical career paths. For her volunteering efforts she has received the 2017 Arbor Award from UofT. In 2018 she was recognized as one of Canada’s 50 inspiring women in STEM and recently recognized as one of Canada’s Tech Titans: Top 19 of 2019. She was featured in Marie Claire, Toronto Life, The Globe and Mail, AI podcast, ReWork’s list of 30 influential women in Canadian AI, UofT’s News, and other media venues.
Yevgeniy Vahlis is the Head of BMO AI – Bank of Montreal’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities group. Prior to joining BMO, Yevgeniy built machine learning research groups at Borealis AI and Georgian Partners and worked closely with startups to introduce applied research into their products. Yevgeniy kicked off his career at AT&T Labs in New York as a research scientist after completing his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a year of postdoctoral studies at Columbia University.