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

Dr. Armanfard is the founder and principal investigator of the iSMART Lab. She holds the position of Associate Professor (tenured) 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 in Canada. 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, McMaster University, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Scale AI, National Research Council Canada, and Canada Foundation for Innovation, among others. Narges’s academic accomplishments extend to the publication of over fifty AI-focused articles across distinguished platforms, including AAAI, WACV, ECAI, BMVC, ECML PKDD, TPAMI, TNNLS, TSMC, TIFS, and more.

Sareh Soleimani

AI Researcher (Postdoctoral)

Sareh received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, both with the prestigious University of Ottawa admission scholarships. She subsequently joined Queen’s University as a postdoctoral fellow focusing on privacy-preservation audio classification for resource-constrained devices. Her research at the iSMART lab focuses on computer vision towards industrial automation.

Bahareh Nikpour

AI Researcher (PhD)

Bahareh is now pursuing a PhD at the iSMART lab and is a recipient of the McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA) and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies. Her research is focused on attention finding (few-shot) using deep reinforcement learning applicable to computer vision.

Mohammadreza Sadeghi

AI Researcher (PhD)

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 to computer vision.

Thi Kieu Khanh Ho

AI Researcher (PhD)

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), the GREAT Award, and the highly prestigious Vanier Scholarship. Her research focuses on time-series anomaly detection using generative models and graphs.

Hadi Hojjati

AI Researcher (PhD)

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 the Graduate Excellence Fellowship Award (GEF), McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA), GREAT Award, and AGE-WELL Award. He is currently doing research on multi-modal data analysis and anomaly detection employing lightweight multimodal large language models.

Dimitrios Sinodinos

AI Researcher (PhD)

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 learning employing lightweight multimodal large language models.

Thomas Lai

AI Researcher (PhD)

Thomas received his Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.) from McGill University. A year after starting his Master’s at the iSMART Lab, Thomas fast-tracked into a PhD. He is a recipient of the MEUSMA and FRQ awards. His research is on open-set anomaly detection.

Saleh Dehqanpour

AI Researcher (PhD)

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.

Ali Karami

AI Researcher (MSc)

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 and diffusion-based methods for video anomaly detection.

Jack Wei

AI Researcher (MSc)

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 tabular data analysis.

Alexander Koran

AI Researcher (MSc)

Alex grew up near Boston, and he moved to Montreal after finishing high school to pursue his undergraduate studies at McGill. He completed his Bachelor’s 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 at the iSMART lab and is a recipient of the GEF award. His MSc thesis focuses on time series anomaly detection.

Zihan Wang

AI Researcher (MSc)

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 with large language models for anomaly detection.

Cormac Cureton

AI Researcher (MSc)

Cormac is pursuing a Master’s of Science at the iSMART lab. He obtained his Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include multi-modality, reinforcement learning, and explainability.

Abhijeet Praveen

AI Researcher (MSc)

Abhijeet is pursuing a Master’s of Science at the iSmart Lab in September 2024. He completed his Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering with a minor in Applied Artificial Intelligence from McGill University. His academic background encompasses machine learning, computer vision and software development. His research interests lie in representation learning and machine learning applications.

Aman Sidhu

Research Assistant (MSc)

Aman received his Bachelor’s degree in Honours Electrical Engineering from McGill University. He is currently an RA in the iSMART Lab and will pursue a Master of Science in ECE with the iSMART lab starting in January 2025. His research focuses on reinforcement learning and computer vision for smart infrastructure and robotics applications.

Amirmohammad Naeini

Research Assistant (MSc)

Amir received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, and his Master’s degree in Computer Science from York University in Toronto, ON, Canada. He is currently a Research Assistant at the iSMART Lab, focusing on software development and AI-related projects, particularly in the context of machine learning applications.

Alexander Wyrstiuk

Research Assistant (BSc)

Alexander is currently enrolled in McGill’s Electrical Engineering BSs program and has added minors in Math and Computer Science upon developing a newfound curiosity in those fields. While at the forefront of cutting-edge technology as well as the intersection of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, AI and Machine Learning are inevitably of great interest to Alexander.

Vania Karami

Postdoctoral (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

Thomas Lai (MSc-Thesis Student)
Moved on to PhD student at McGill University

Jiahao Lu (PhD Student)
Moved on to the University of Copenhagen

Damien Gengler (MSc-Thesis Student)
Moved on to Gravite.io as Machine Learning Engineer

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

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

Thomas Lai
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