Harris Chan bio photo

Harris Chan

Graduate ML Student

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I’m a PhD student in the Machine Learning Group, co-supervised by Prof. Jimmy Ba and Prof. Sheila McIlratih. During my MSc, I was co-supervised by Prof. Sanja Fidler and Prof. Jimmy Ba. During my undergraduate degree, I studied Engineering Science, majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. My undergraduate thesis advisor was Prof. Deepa Kundur. I interned at Qualcomm Canada in the Video Processing group as part of my Professional Experience Year for 16 months. Prior to starting my graduate degree, I spent a year working at Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) in the OpenCL Usability team. Recently, I was a research intern at Borealis AI (with Kevin Luk), Google Brain Toronto (with William Chan and Jamie Kiros), Google Research (with DeLesley Hutchins), Google Brain Robotics (with Ted Xiao), and Google DeepMind (with Vlad Mnih). More details in my CV.

I’m also a speedcuber.

If you are interested in working with me and/or in our lab, please fill out this application form or contact me directly.

Research Interests

My dream is to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). Currently, I’m interested in developing efficient and generalizable learning systems at the intersection of reinforcement learning and natural language processing, which can allow humans to interact with the system as it learns, and potentially help it learn more like humans. I’m also working on generative models for discrete objects such as graphs and texts, as a step towards abstract modeling of the world.

Teachings

I was a Teaching Assistant for the following courses:

Talks

  • Closing the generalization gap in stochastic optimization through Fisher gradient noise. Vector Institute, Toronto, Canada. February, 2018