David Austin

Welcome

I’m a faculty affiliate researcher at the Vector Institute in Toronto, currently working with Dr. Scott Sanner and Dr. Chris McIntosh of the University of Toronto.

In September 2024, I’ll begin my Master’s degree at MILA/McGill under the supervision of Dr. Jackie Cheung.

In 2023, I earned a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Waterloo with a minor in Statistics.

Research Interests

My research interests are in Natural Language Processing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Information Retrieval. My long-term goal is to develop intelligent interactive systems. I think that these systems should be trustworthy, accessible, rational, and multimodal.

I am leading a project with Dr. Sanner to extend decision-theoretic conversational recommendation systems to handle an unbounded language space. We combine the explicit models provided by decision theory with the free language interaction of LLMs.

My current research with Dr. McIntosh aims to develop a multimodal foundation model that is able to unify medical modalities (e.g. ECG, CXR) using text as a shared embedding space (similar to Med-PaLM-M and ImageBind).