Prof. Narges Armanfard (Ph.D., P.Eng.)

Dr. Armanfard is the founder and principal investigator of the iSMART Lab. She holds the position of Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, as well as at Mila - Quebec AI Institute. She is also affiliated with McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM), McGill initiative in Computational Medicine (MiCM), and McGill Institute for Aerospace Engineering (MIAE). She earned her Ph.D. and Postdoctoral in Artificial Intelligence from McMaster University and the University of Toronto, respectively, in Ontario, Canada. Her research focus lies in developing innovative algorithms for various domains such as time-series data analysis, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and representation learning for tasks including data clustering, classification, and anomaly detection. Her contributions to the field of AI have been acknowledged through numerous awards from institutions, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, AgeWell, Vanier-Banting, the Fonds de recherche du Québec, as well as McMaster University, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Scale AI, among others. Narges’s academic accomplishments extend to the publication of over fifty AI-focused articles across distinguished platforms, including AAAI, BMVC, ECML PKDD, TPAMI, TNNLS, TSMC, TIFS, and more.

Bahareh Nikpour

PhD Student

Bahareh received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran. She has received the prestigious McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA) and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies. Her research is focused on (few-shot) attention finding in deep reinforcement learning applicable to video anomaly detection.

Mohammadreza Sadeghi

PhD Student

Mohammadreza received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran. He has received the prestigious McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA) and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies. His research is focused on unsupervised data clustering with applications for anomaly detection.

Thi Kieu Khanh Ho

PhD Student

Khanh received her Master’s degree at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), South Korea. She was a researcher at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH), South Korea, before moving to Montreal for her PhD. She has received the prestigious McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA), GREAT Award and is nominated for the prestigious Vanier Scholarship. Her research focuses on time-series data anomaly detection using generative models and graphs.

Hadi Hojjati

PhD Student

Hadi received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. He started as an MSc student at the iSMART Lab. and fast-tracked to PhD. He has received Graduate Excellence Fellowship Award (GEF), McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA), GREAT Award, and AGE-WELL Award. He is currently doing research on multi-modal and multi-variate anomaly detection in time-series data.

Dimitrios Sinodinos

PhD Student

Dimitrios completed his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at McGill University and was awarded the British Association Medal for graduating with the highest CGPA in the department. Shortly after starting his Master’s, Dimitrios fast-tracked into a PhD, where he received the MEDA Award and was selected into the prestigious Vadasz Scholars program. His research involves multi-task learning, attention, and deep reinforcement learning for video anomaly detection.

Xingyue Shi

PhD Student

Xingyue is set to commence her Ph.D. journey in September 2024, holding an MSc degree in Applied Computer Technology from Peking University and a B.Eng. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Sun Yat-sen University. Her academic background encompasses machine learning, computer vision, and high-performance computing. Currently, Xingyue is intrigued by the challenges of learning with limited supervision and enhancing generalization, specifically within the scope of anomaly detection.

Saleh Dehqanpour

PhD Student

Saleh will begin his Ph.D. studies in September 2024. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. His academic background is in machine learning, video processing, and data pipelines. His research interests include algorithm design, deep learning applications, and computer vision.

Jiahao Lu

PhD Student

Lu is a visiting PhD student from the IMAGE section of the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Previously, Lu attained his MSc in Computational Science at the MIDA group of the Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden. His research at the iSMART lab focuses on explainable AI (XAI) for anomaly detection.

Cormac Cureton

Master Student

Cormac will begin pursuing a Master’s of Science at the iSMART lab in September 2024. He is currently completing a Bachelors of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include multi-modality, reinforcement learning, and explainability.

Ali Karami

Master Student

Ali received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran. He is the recipient of the Graduate Excellence Fellowship Award (GEF). His research focuses on graph-based attention finding using deep reinforcement learning for video anomaly detection.

Damien Gengler

Master Student

Damien obtained his BSc in Computer Science from EPFL in Switzerland. He then started a Master’s in Data Science at EPFL, with a high focus on Machine Learning. He is now completing his MSc thesis at the iSMART Lab. His research focuses on (few-shot) continual learning for anomaly detection.

Jack Wei

Master Student

Jack (Yi) Wei received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from McGill University. He is the recipient of the McGill Engineering Undergraduate Student Award (MEUSMA). His interest lies in self-supervised learning for tabular data anomaly detection.

Thomas Lai

Master Student

Thomas received his Bachelor’s of Engineering (B.Eng.) from McGill University. He is now pursuing a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering at the iSMART lab and is a recipient of the MEUSMA award. His research is on open-set multi-variate time series anomaly detection.

Zihan Wang

Master Student

Zihan received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta, Canada. He is now an MSc student at the iSMART Lab. He is the recipient of the Graduate Excellence Fellowship Award. His research at the iSMART Lab is focused on continual learning for anomaly detection.

Alexander Koran

Master Student

Alex grew up near Boston, and he moved to Montreal after finishing high school to pursue his undergraduate studies at McGill. He completed his Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering with a math minor and an AI minor in Fall 2023. Some of his research interests are algorithm design, machine learning applications, and quantum computing. He is now pursuing a Master’s of Science in at the iSMART lab and is a recipient of the MEUSMA award.

Vania Karami

Postdoc (co-supervised)

Vania received her PhD in Health and Life science from the University of Camerino, Italy. Her doctoral research focused on developing a computer-aided diagnosis system for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using extracted biomarkers from human brain data. Her PhD research has been awarded one of the young investigator prizes for doctoral candidates. She is currently integrating AI and robotics to identify behavioral- and communication-based markers for the early detection of AD.

Sushant Sinha

Master Student (co-supervised)

Sushant obtained his B.Tech from BIT Sindri, India. He is currently an MSc. thesis student. He has received the MITACS Graduate Fellowship. His research focuses on the application of machine learning for Hot Rolling of Steel. His interest is in understanding the structure-property relationship and correlating it to fundamental concepts.

Samer Jammoul

Master Student (co-supervised)

Samer received his medical degree and completed his post-graduate medical studies in adult cardiology at McGill. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Digital Health Innovation with an interest in applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence in medicine, particularly in multi-modal cardiac imaging.

Graduate Students

Denzel Guy (MSc-Thesis Student, Co-Supervised)
Moved on to Project Manager at Kingston Process Metallurgy Inc. (KPM)

Dimitrios Sinodinos (MSc-Thesis Student)
Moved on to PhD student at McGill University

Hadi Hojjati (MSc-Thesis Student)
Moved on to PhD student at McGill University

Tri-tin Truong (MSc-Thesis Student)
Moved on to Amazon in Vancouver

Shuhong Shen (MSc-Thesis Student, Co-Supervised)
Moved on to Hatch in Toronto

BSc students

Alex Koran
Moved on to MSc-Thesis Student, McGill University

Amal Koodoruth
Moved on to Data Scientist at SFJ Technologies LLC, New York, NY

Dimitrios Sinodinos
Moved on to MSc-Thesis Student, McGill University

Tri-tin Truong
Moved on to MSc-Thesis Student, McGill University

William Zhang
Moved on to Google, Seattle

Michael Li
Moved on to Google, Toronto

Zice Tang
Moved on to MSc-Thesis Student, McGill University

Ziwen Jiang
Moved on to MSc-Thesis Student, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Yeseul Lee

Hailey Kang