Background

Irina Rish is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Operations Research Department at the Université de Montréal (UdeM) and a core member of Mila – The Quebec Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute. She also holds the Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

Dr. Rish has a MSc and a PhD in AI from University of California, Irvine and a MSc in Applied Mathematics from Moscow Gubkin Institute.

Before joining UdeM and Mila in 2019, Irina Rish was a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where she worked on various projects at the intersection of neuroscience and AI and led the Neuro-AI challenge. She received multiple IBM awards, including IBM Eminence & Excellence Award and IBM Outstanding Innovation Award in 2018, IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award in 2017, and IBM Research Accomplishment Award in 2009.

Dr. Rish holds 64 patents, has published over 80 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books, and a monograph on Sparse Modeling.

Her research focus on machine learning, neural data analysis and neuroscience-inspired AI. Her current research interests include continual lifelong learning, optimization algorithms for deep neural networks, sparse modeling and probabilistic inference, dialog generation, biologically plausible reinforcement learning, and dynamical systems approaches to brain imaging analysis.

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