David Austin

Incoming MSc student at MILA/McGill

Career

I’m a faculty affiliate researcher at the Vector Institute in Toronto. I’m currently working with Dr. Scott Sanner and Dr. Chris McIntosh of the University of Toronto. I hold a B.CS from the University of Waterloo in Computer Science with a minor in Statistics.

I am leading a project with Dr. Sanner to extend decision-theoretic conversational recommendation systems to handle an unbounded language space. We combine the long-term planning 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). Education Background

I graduated from the University of Waterloo in April 2023 with a major in Computer Science and minor in Statistics. I’ve completed several internships working with machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). I hope to pursue further studies in the field.

My research interests include the following:

  • natural language processing
  • intelligent interactive systems
  • multimodality
  • information retrieval (particularly recommendation systems)
  • human-computer interaction
  • clinical applications (which I believe can motivate interesting theoretical problems)
  • social impact of AI

Hobbies

Outside of my research work, I like to play music, read, run, draw, and more.

This year (2023), I ran my first ever 10K with a time of 0:50:28 and played my first ever live musical performance (on guitar and bass).

Currently reading (Jan 2024):

  • Southeast Asia: An Introductory History by Milton Osborne
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear