Shazan Jabbar

Shazan is a Lead ML Scientist at Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII) and an actively contributing researcher with ANA (Automated Nursing Agent) Research Team at University of Alberta to build emotionally aware conversational agents.

In the past he has extensively worked on applying Machine Learning to address environmental public health issues such as understanding the impact of air pollution on children’s health. This joint research effort, done in collaboration with multidisciplinary researchers and knowledge users from several leading universities, research and health organizations across Canada, has been published in some key venues in Applied ML and public health domain.

At Amii, most of Shazan’s domain focus had shifted to applying Machine Learning in Agriculture through his work with some Ag domain corporate partners of Amii . To that end he has a few years of experience ranging from carrying out hands-on research to advising on advanced research work in the AgTech field.

Given his current research focus in NLP, he also plays an advisory role with businesses with an interest in Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning and related technologies as well.

Prior to his career in ML, Shazan also got first hand experience in building scalable, data driven, technology solutions for the food service industry at Sysco Labs, the innovation arm of the Sysco Corporation (NYSE:SYY).

His ML research interests include natural language processing, spatial data mining, and reinforcement learning. Currently, Shazan’s research work focuses on building better, emotionally-aware, conversational agents for elderly.

Shazan received his Master of Science in Computing Science under the supervision of Dr. Osmar R. Zaiane at the University of Alberta. He also holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons) degree in Computer Science as well.