Professor Pascal Poupart has received a $50,000 grant from CIBC to support artificial intelligence research through PhD-level training. The award marks the first research collaboration between CIBC and the University of Waterloo focusing specifically on AI, and reflects the bank’s commitment to growing AI talent in Canada by funding doctoral research.
Titled Representation Learning for Tabular Data with Heterogeneous Feature Types, the CIBC-funded research will support PhD candidate William Loh, who is supervised by Professor Poupart.
“Industry–academic partnerships such as this are crucial to advance AI research and train the next generation of computer scientists,” said Professor Poupart. “With CIBC’s support, William will develop a generalist agent capable of making predictions across a wide range of tasks, particularly event prediction, using tabular foundation models.”
William Loh is a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, supervised by Professor Pascal Poupart, with research interests in machine learning. He holds a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Waterloo.
A main challenge of the research is handling the heterogeneous nature of tabular data, which can include categorical, numerical, temporal and monetary features. Developing models that can learn effectively from these diverse data types is key to creating systems that generalize well across different tasks and domains.
“CIBC’s commitment to AI research at Waterloo will foster innovation, and contribute to both growing AI talent and developing intellectual property in Canada,” said Erin Li, Director, Applied AI Research at CIBC. “William is pursuing innovative ideas and contributing to the development of AI technologies that will have meaningful impact in the nation’s financial sector and beyond.”