Meet the Faculty: Mengye Ren
This entree is a part of our Meet the Faculty blog series, which introduces and highlights faculty who have recently joined CDS.
Meet CDS Faculty Mengye Ren, who joined CDS this fall as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. He is currently a visiting researcher at Google Brain Toronto where he works with Professor Geoffrey Hinton. His research focuses on enhancing the human-like qualities of machine learning in order for artificial intelligence to learn, adapt, and reason in naturalistic environments.
“In the era of big data and AI, it is critical to understand how intelligent agents, like ourselves, can learn without using planet-scale data but through our individual sense of the world,” said Ren. In line with developing more flexible artificial intelligence, his research focuses on meta-learning and representation learning algorithms.
Ren earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s in Engineering Science. His PhD was advised by Professor Richard Zemel and Professor Raquel Urtasun. He has worked as a senior research scientist at Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) and Waabi as well as held internships at major technology companies such as Twitter, Google, and Microsoft.
In addition to meta-learning and representation learning algorithms, his area of interest encompasses machine learning, computer vision, few-shot learning, brain and cognitively inspired learning, robot learning, and self-driving vehicles. Ren has given talks at Stanford, Brown, MIT, the University of Oxford, and has taught courses at the University of Toronto as well as the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
“I am excited to join CDS to continue building its strength in AI and data science research as well as explore collaborative opportunities with people in relevant areas,” said Ren.
To view all our current faculty, please visit the CDS Joint Faculty page on our website.
By Meryl Phair
