APSTAT's Founders
ApSTAT's founders share a passion for state-of-the-art research in data mining and statistical machine learning, as well as a true desire to make these technological advancements available to industrial users.
Yoshua Bengio, Ph.D.
Yoshua is full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at University of Montreal.
He holds the Canada Research Chair in statistical learning algorithms as well as the NSERC--CGI industrial chair in high-dimensional data mining for electronic finance. He completed a Ph.D. at McGill University as well as two post-docs, a first one at MIT and a second at AT&T Bell Labs.
He successfully led a number of industrial research contracts, most recently for AstraZeneca, Bell Canada, Desjardins, CGI and Google.
Nicolas Chapados, Ph.D.
Nicolas holds a Bachelor's in computer engineering from McGill University and a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Montreal.
For five years, he was a member of the scientific staff at Nortel Networks (formerly Bell-Northern Research) where he led the research and initial implementation of a natural-language dialog manager, based on continuous speech recognition and natural language understanding.
He has more than 20 years of experience in object-oriented software design and an expertise in C++ development. He specializes in financial portfolio management methods making use of machine learning algorithms, as well as in time-series forecasting.
Charles Dugas, Ph.D.
Charles holds a Bachelor's in actuarial mathematics from Laval University, a Master's in electrical engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal, and a Ph.D. from University of Montreal. He is an associate member of the Society of Actuaries.
After working for two years for an actuarial consulting firm, W.M. Mercer, he contributed at HNC Software (now Fair Isaac Inc.) to the development of one of the world's most profitable neural networks, used for credit card fraud detection.
He is currently assistant professor of actuarial mathematics at University of Montreal.
Pascal Vincent, Ph.D.
Pascal holds an engineering degree from a French grande école, l'École Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Électronique et Électrotechnique.
He worked for a number of prestigious research laboratories, including Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs, AT&T Labs Research and Microsoft Research, where he contributed to a number of projects making use of learning algorithms, some of which now enjoying significant commercial success. He initiated and designed the data mining software platform developed by ApSTAT.
He is now assistant professor of computer science at University of Montreal.