Victor Zhong
CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVictor Zhong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, bringing 12 years of research and engineering experience in machine learning and natural language processing. His background spans industry research roles at Microsoft Research, Facebook AI, Google Brain, and Salesforce Research, where he focused on question answering, knowledge base population, and task-oriented dialogue. He earned a PhD from the University of Washington after an MS at Stanford and a BASc from the University of Toronto, grounding his work in both theoretical and applied perspectives. Victor has hands-on contributions to major open-source NLP and deep learning projects—ranging from CoreNLP refactors and Keras embedding improvements to documentation work on Stanford’s Stanza—that reflect both engineering rigor and attention to usability. He combines an academic publication record with practical system-building experience, often bridging research prototypes and production-quality code. Colleagues describe him as a researcher-engineer who moves fluently between model design, engineering hygiene, and clear technical communication.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of WashingtonBASc Electrical and Computer Engineering, BASc Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of TorontoMasters of Science Computer Science, Masters of Science Computer Science at Stanford University
english, mandarin
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (22)
python10
artificial-neural-networks10
machine-learning10
java10
javas10
keras10
query-parser10
deeplearning-ai10
deep-learning10
tensorflow10
read-me10
natural-language-processing10
neural-network10
query-engine10
nlp10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
salesforce/WikiSQL
Aug 2017 - May 2021
A large annotated semantic parsing corpus for developing natural language interfaces.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:3 releases, 2 reviews, 69 commits in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Victor contributed to the `wikisql` repository, a project focused on natural language interfaces. Their commits involved modifications to the `annotate.py` and `lib/query.py` files, which suggests a focus on the annotation pipeline and query processing. Specifically, they made changes related to annotating natural language questions and generating structured query representations, indicating involvement in the core functionality of the system.
nlpnatural-language-interfacedevelopingcorpusdataset
keras-team/keras
May 2015 - May 2015
Deep Learning for humans
Role in this project:ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:9 commits, 2 PRs, 25 comments in 4 days
Contributions summary:Victor primarily contributed to the `keras-team/keras` repository by implementing features related to embeddings, constraints, and regularizers within the Keras library. Their work included adding unitnorm constraints to the Embedding layer, updating the layer to support regularizers and constraints, and incorporating these changes. The user also added a utility for network visualization using dot, enhancing the library's capabilities for model analysis.
pythondata-sciencedeep-learningneural-networksmachine-learning
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