Computer science grad a gold-medal winner

Computer science graduate Yifeng Li, who received his doctoral degree in June 2014 with a 96 percent grade point average, has achieved the highest academic standing at the graduate level among his cohort and will receive the Governor General’s Gold Medal at the first session of Convocation on Saturday, October 18.

Dr. Li completed his dissertation, entitled “Sparse machine learning models in bioinformatics,” under the supervision of professors Alioune Ngom and Luis Rueda. He received graduate scholarships from 2009 to 201 and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship in 2011 and 2012. He is the author of seven publications in refereed journals, 20 conference proceedings papers and a book chapter, as well as several software packages.

Currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia, Li is serving as the local arrangements chair of the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, the largest event of its kind, to be held in Vancouver in 2016.

He will deliver the free public presentation, “Multi-Class Feature Selection in Deep Learning,” as part of the School of Computer Science Colloquium series, at 10 a.m. Friday, October 17, in room B04, Odette Building.

Also centred out for recognition during the University of Windsor’s 102nd Convocation ceremonies will be winners of the Board of Governors Medals, awarded to the graduating student with the highest academic standing in each program:

  • Civil and Environmental Engineering: Yanting Liu
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering: Wesley Joseph Perdu
  • Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering: Salem Mohammed Jabr
  • Mechanical, Automotive and Materials Engineering: Yiteng Liang

These medallists are in-course and will not graduate this fall:

  • Arts: Hannah Robinson
  • Social Sciences: Rebecca Pillon
  • Business Administration: Colin Poulin
  • Engineering: Alex Michael Smith
  • Law – JD : Jillian Mulroy
  • Law – Dual JD: Daniel Conrad
  • Human Kinetics: Paige Coyne
  • Nursing: Li Wang
  • Science: Mohamad Harb
  • Inter-Faculty: Daniel Tarade
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