Incoming master’s student Sabrina Mokhtari has received a 2022–23 Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence from the Vector Institute. These merit-based scholarships provide $17,500 for one year of full-time study and are awarded to exceptional students who have been admitted into an AI-related master’s program in an Ontario university.
Starting this fall, Sabrina will be a thesis-based master’s student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, advised by Professor Gautam Kamath who leads The Salon — a research group dedicated to the study of Statistics, Algorithms, Learning, and OptimizatioN.
“Congratulations to Sabrina,” said Professor Kamath. “It’s fantastic to see the Vector Institute recognize her academic excellence and potential to do outstanding machine learning research. I’m looking forward to working with her as we explore problems in the space of robust and private machine learning together.”
Sabrina has a BSc in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran. During her studies, she completed a variety of computer science courses and developed a passion for research in artificial intelligence. She is particularly interested in exploring data privacy and robustness in machine learning, fairness in algorithms, and applying theoretical knowledge to build practical AI-based tools.
In addition to her academic studies, Sabrina was a research assistant at the Robust and Interpretable Machine Learning Laboratory at Sharif University of Technology, where she worked on defence mechanisms to design robust vision transformers and enhance their robustness while minimizing adversarial training time and preventing catastrophic overfitting.
Sabrina also worked at Wize Analytics where she acquired valuable practical experience in building AI systems. In particular, she worked on an AI-driven big data processing platform that establishes methods on the data storage layer to facilitate predictive analytics. She helped implement a comprehensive preprocessing pipeline to provide clean data and accelerate the training process. This resulted in developing several text-processing features such as text spell correction, text normalization, and string obfuscation.
Vector Scholarships in Artificial Intelligence were awarded to 110 master’s students across Ontario in this fifth year of funding. In addition to financial support, scholarship recipients can attend events and talks to meet leading AI researchers, clinicians, and teams from top employers. Scholarship recipients are also encouraged to take advantage of Vector’s Digital Talent Hub, career development and networking events, and AI-specific career support programs.
About the Vector Institute
The Vector Institute is an independent, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to research in the field of artificial intelligence, excelling in machine and deep learning. The Vector Institute launched in March 2017 with generous support from the Government of Canada, Government of Ontario, and private industry, and in partnership with the University of Toronto and other universities.
The Vector Institute works with institutions, industry, start-ups, incubators and accelerators to advance AI research and drive its application, adoption and commercialization across Canada.
Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence quick facts
- Number of master’s scholarships awarded in this cycle of funding: 110
- Number of scholarships awarded since program launched in 2018: 461
- Number of Ontario institutions with recipients in this cycle of funding: 13
- Number of AI programs receiving scholarships this cycle of funding: 40
