Awards

CIM member Joelle Pineau accepts award from then-Governor General Julie Payette

CIM members and students are recognized for their research contributions and accomplishments on a regular basis. This includes awards at top conferences, in professional associations, and from McGill University.

2020 Awards

Tal Arbel is awarded a Canada CIFAR AI Chair as an associate faculty member of Mila. This appointment is awarded by the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Program and is worth $500,000, starting on January 1, 2020 and lasting until January 1, 2025. The award provides $50,000 per year in research funding (of which $10,000 is allocated for covering teaching relief of one course per year) and $50,000 per year in salary award.

Prof. Arbel started new journal in 2020, the Journal on Machine Learning for Biomedical Image Analysis (MELBA) for which she also serves as Editor-in-Chief. MELBA is the first journal to formally bridge the gap between the machine learning and biomedical imaging communities.

Peter Caines was featured in the IEEE Control Systems Society Magazine in December, 2020 with a Feature Portrait and Interview entitled “People in Control: PEC”.

The Ph.D. thesis of Prof. Jozsef Kovecses’ student Albert Peiret won the Lagrange Award of the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science (IFToMM) in 2020. The award was established in 2017 by Springer and the IFToMM Technical Committee for Multibody Dynamics with the aim of recognizing the outstanding achievements of a young researcher (under 35 years old) at the early stage of their scientific career.

Aditya Mahajan is a main PI for a $1.5 million grant for the DND IDEaS Micro-Net on Adaptive Interaction and Behavior for Human-Automation Teaming.

Prof. Mahajan was a keynote Speaker speaker Conference on Control, Dynamic Systems, and Robotics (CDSR) and gave invited talks at University of Michigan, Cambridge University, and Adobe Research. He is also an Associate Editor for Mathematics of Control, Signals, and Systems (Springer Journal).

David Meger received a best paper at the RSS Workshop on Self-Supervised Robot Learning for his work entitled “Self-Supervised, Goal-Conditioned Policies for Navigation in Unstructured Environments”, written in collaboration with CIM member Gregory Dudek and members of the Mobile Robotics Lab.

Meyer Nahon has a Google Scholar h-index of 40, total citations >5000 which is among the highest in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Derek Nowrouzezahrai won a Best Paper Award (runner up) for “An Efficient Transport Estimator for Complex Layered Materials” by Gamboa, L. E., Gruson, A. and Nowrouzezahrai, D. published in the Computer Graphics Forum Journal, 39(2): 363–371 (2020) and presented at the ACM Eurographics Annual Conference. (September 2020).

Prof. Nowrouzezahrai also received a spotlight paper presentation invitation for “Regularized Inverse Reinforcement Learning” by Jeon, W., Su, C., Barde, P., Doan, T., Nowrouzezahrai, D. and Pineau J. published in the 9th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2021, Virtual, USA, 2021.

Prof. Nowrouzezahrai is the first full-time tenure-track faculty member from the Faculty of Engineering to be appointed as a Core Academic Faculty member in the Quebec Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Mila). His research program and NSERC/Ubisoft Industrial Research Chair collaborations were featured on the McGill website and the website of the Vice- Principal’s Office for Research and Innovation.

Joelle Pineau was renewed for a second term as a William Dawson Scholar chair, which recognizes a scholar developing into an outstanding and original researcher of world-class caliber who is poised to become a leader in his or her field.

Kaleem Siddiqi was awarded an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement for his work on “Diffusion and Geometry in Biological Tissue”. This award is valued at $40,000 per year for 3 years and he is the Principal investigator. This is his second DAS.

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