Professor Richard Zemel is the 2023 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). (Photo: Johnny Guatto)
Professor Richard Zemel has received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC) in recognition of his research contributions to machine learning.
As CAIAC’s highest honour, the award recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves through outstanding research excellence in artificial intelligence over the course of their more than 25-year academic career.
Zemel received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1994. In 2000 he returned to U of T, where he helped build one of the world’s preeminent machine learning groups. He was promoted to Professor in 2009 and appointed the inaugural Research Director of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2017.
Zemel has researched unsupervised learning for many years. His PhD developed a method known as an autoencoder, which trains a neural network to predict its own inputs. Autoencoders have become a dominant theme in machine learning and led to arguably the most significant progress in machine learning — the ability to learn representations that can be utilized for multiple tasks.
Another important dimension of Zemel’s research is algorithmic fairness. His 2012 paper “Fairness through awareness” formalized desirable fairness properties of a classifier. His group followed up by showing how existing learning algorithms could be modified to eliminate discriminatory biases.
Zemel’s group has also published some of the foundational papers on few-shot learning, which considers how new concepts and classes can be learned given only a few labelled examples. His work has shown how a neural network could be formulated to address this problem, and his 2017 paper “Prototypical networks for few-shot learning” has become a standard approach in academia and industry. Zemel has also shown how neural networks could be applied to graphs, developing a message-passing approach that has been applied to many important areas, including drug discovery, health, and social networks.
In addition to his research contributions, Zemel’s valuable mentorship to Canadian students is reflected in his supervision of 19 PhD graduates and eight postdocs, many of whom have taken on prestigious academic or industrial research roles in Canada and the United States.
Past recipients of the CAIAC Lifetime Achievement Award from the Department of Computer Science include the late Professor Fahiem Bacchus, University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus Graeme Hirst, Professor Emeritus Hector Levesque and Professor Emeritus John Mylopoulos.