Scientific

Moderated Questions

1. What was the first job you had after graduation and how did you get it?
2. What do you like most/least about your current work?
3. If you could go back in time and change one thing about your career choices what would you do?
4. What advice do you have for the students in the audience looking for their first job?

Speaker Bios

Bernard Chan is currently a data scientist at BuildDirect.com (BD), an e-commerce platform in flooring, tiles and other home improvement products. At BD, Bernard is part of the analytics team and he specializes in logistics related data problems such as freight rate and route planning. Prior to working at BD, Bernard was a applied mathematics researcher in dynamical systems and bifurcation theory.

Soyean Kim is a professional statistician (P.STAT) who is passionate about ethical use of data and algorithms to contribute to the betterment of society. She currently leads a team of data scientists at Technical Safety BC, a safety regulator in Canada. Her key contribution includes advancing ethics roadmap in predictive system and deployment of AI and machine learning to help safety inspection process. Her previous leadership roles include her tenure at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Fortis as a rate design manager. She is an advocate for “Data for Good” and a speaker on the topic of real world applications of AI. Her latest speaking engagement includes PAPIs in London, UK which is a series of international AI conferences, and BC Tech Summit in Vancouver.

Michael Reid received a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from UMBC before starting work as junior web developer for a US federal government consulting agency. After moving to Vancouver, he’s worked in software engineering at companies ranging from small consulting firms to Amazon Web Services. He recently co-founded Nautilus Technologies, a machine learning and data privacy startup in Vancouver.

Parin Shah is a Data Scientist at KPMG focused on solving machine learning and data engineering problems in the space of mining, gaming, insurance and social media. Previously, he spent 2.5 years helping develop the digital analytics practice for an e-commerce firm, Natural Wellbeing, where he worked on setting up data infrastructure, building consumer analytics models and website experimentation. Parin was a fellow at a UBC machine learning workshop and has an undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a coursework concentrated in economics with statistics and computer science electives.

Dr. Aanchan Mohan is a machine learning scientist and software engineer at Synaptitude Brain Health. He is currently working on software and machine learning methods to encourage circadian regulation with the goal of improving an individual’s brain health. His current research interests include problems in natural language processing. Dr. Mohan has worked on Bayesian and deep learning methods applied to time series signals across multiple domains. He holds a PhD from McGill University where he focused on transfer learning and parameter sharing in acoustic models for speech recognition. He supervises students and actively publishes in the area of speech processing. He is a named co-inventor on two issued patents in the area of speech processing, and one filed patent in the area of wearable devices. He is a co-organizer of the AI in Production, and Natural Language Processing meetups in Vancouver.

I will describe recent joint work with Jeroen Sijsling, Drew Sutherland, John Voight and Dan Yasaki on genus 2 curves over Q. Our work has three primary goals: (1) produce an extensive table of genus 2 curves and their associated invariants; (2) explain the various Sato-Tate groups that arise in terms of functoriality; (3) prove at least one example of modularity for each nongeneric Sato-Tate group. Goal (1) was achieved in arXiv:1602.03715, with the data accessible inthe LMFDB, while goals (2) and (3) are in progress.

How social traits evolve remains an open question in evolutionary biology. Two traits of particular interest are altruism (where an individual incurs a cost to help others) and spite (where an individual incurs a cost to harm others). Both traits should be evolutionarily disadvantageous because any benefits arising from these behaviours are also available to “cheaters” who do not pay the cost of displaying altruism or spite themselves. In this talk I will show how stochasticity can sometimes reverse the direction of evolution and drive the emergence of these behaviours. I will start with an individual-based evolutionary model and then approximate it using a system of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). These SDEs are then be reduced to a single SDE on a “slow manifold” governing the evolutionary dynamics. A rather complete analysis of this SDE is then possible, showing exactly when and how stochasticity can drive the evolution of altruism and spite.

Biography:

Tryo Day is a Professor and former CRC in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen’s University. His research interests involve evolutionary theory, including the evolution of pathogen virulence, drug resistance, social traits, and epigenetic inheritance.

Dr. Day is coauthor (with James Stewart) of the textbooks “Biocalculus: Calculus, Probability and Statistics for the Life Sciences”, and (with Sarah P. Otto) “A Biologist’s Guide to Mathematical Modeling”. He is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the AAAS, and is the recipient of a Killam Research Fellowship, a Steacie Fellowship, the CAIMS Research Prize, and the Steacie Prize.

There have been several recent outbreaks of cholera (for example, in Haiti and Yemen), which is a bacterial disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. It can be transmitted to humans directly by person-to-person contact or indirectly via contaminated water. Random mixing cholera models from the literature are first formulated and briefly analyzed. Heterogeneities in person-to-person contact are introduced, by means of a multigroup model, and then by means of a contact network model. Utilizing an interplay of analysis and linear algebra, various control strategies for cholera are suggested by these models.

Pauline van den Driessche is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on aspects of stability in biological models and matrix analysis. Current research projects include disease transmission models that are appropriate for influenza, cholera and Zika. Most models include control strategies (e.g., vaccination for influenza) and aim to address questions relevant for public health. Sign pattern matrices occur in these models, and the possible inertias of such patterns is a current interest.

In a reconfiguration problem, the goal is to change an initial configuration of some structure to a final configuration using some limited set of moves. Examples include: sorting a list by swapping pairs of adjacent elements; finding the edit distance between two strings; or solving a Rubik’s cube in a minimum number of moves. Central questions are: Is reconfiguration possible? How many moves are required?

In this talk I will survey some reconfiguration problems, and then discuss the case of triangulations of a point set in the plane. A move in this case is a flip that replaces one edge by the opposite edge of its surrounding quadrilateral when that quadrilateral is convex. In joint work with Zuzana Masárová and Uli Wagner we characterize when one edge-labelled triangulation can be reconfigured to another via flips. The proof involves combinatorics, geometry, and topology.

Anna Lubiw is a professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. She has a PhD from the University of Toronto (1986) and a Master of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo (1983).

Her research is in the areas of Computational Geometry, Graph Drawing and Graph Algorithms. She was named the Ross and Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow in 2014, received the University of Waterloo outstanding performance award in 2012 and was named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2009. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computational Geometry and the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications.