Organizers
Joaquin Vanschoren is an Assistant Professor in Machine Learning at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He holds a PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on meta-learning and understanding and automating machine learning. He founded and leads OpenML.org, a popular open science platform that facilitates the sharing and reuse of reproducible empirical machine learning data. He obtained several demo and application awards and has been invited speaker at ECDA, StatComp, IDA, AutoML@ICML, CiML@NIPS, AutoML@PRICAI, MLOSS@NIPS, and many other occasions, as well as tutorial speaker at NIPS and ECMLPKDD. He was general chair at LION 2016, program chair of Discovery Science 2018, demo chair at ECMLPKDD 2013, and co-organizes the AutoML and meta-learning workshop series at NIPS 2018, ICML 2016-2018, ECMLPKDD 2012-2015, and ECAI 2012-2014. He is also editor and contributor to the book 'Automatic Machine Learning: Methods, Systems, Challenges'.
Blessing is currently a postdoctoral fellow (second year) and instructor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, Toronto. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has over fifteen (15) years of combined professional experience across a broad range of fields in academia, industry, and community-based organizations. He is a dynamic team player who is eager to utilize his diverse talents to advance in research and innovation.
Machine/Deep Learning Engineer, Solutions Architect, Data Engineer, Attorney (US)
I’m a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, in the BioML group. I’m interested in how machine learning can help us discover new insights from biological data, by finding patterns that are too subtle or large-scale to identify unassisted. I primarily focus on biological images, and my research often designs self-supervised learning methods, as I believe these methods are unbiased by prior knowledge.
Sahra Ghalebikesabi is a fourth year PhD student at the University of Oxford, supervised by Chris Holmes. During her PhD, she interned at DeepMind London and Microsoft Research Cambridge. She is also a Microsoft Research PhD Fellow. Her research focusses on generative modelling for robustness, differential privacy and interpretability.
