David Austin

PhD student at MILA/McGill

Research Interests

  • Multi-agent systems
  • Information retrieval and processing
  • Neuro-symbolic AI
  • AI for social good

Education

Graduate Studies at McGill University (2024 - Present)

I am currently a PhD student supervised by Dr. Jackie Cheung at McGill Univeristy and MILA in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Research at the University of Toronto (2023 - 2024)

In 2023-24, I was a faculty affiliate researcher at the Vector Institute in Toronto, with Dr. Scott Sanner and Dr. Chris McIntosh of the University of Toronto.

I led 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.

I worked with Dr. Chris McIntosh’s lab 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).

Undergraduate Studies at the University of Waterloo (2018 - 2023)

At UWaterloo, I majored in Computer Science and minored in Statistics. I completed 5 internships working with machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).

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).