Ph.D student, Topic: Using LLMs to catch coding mistakes. Awards: Ontario Graduate Scholarship recipient, Conference Presentation award (5th Annual Student Conference at UofW). Sep 2022-ongoing.
Ph.D. student. Topic: Automating the Quality Prediction of Survey Questions: Predicting Measurement Quality Directly from Natural Text. Awards: Sprott award for particular promise in research. Jan 2023-ongoing.
Co-op student/ research assistant. Undergraduate student with a Computer Science major. Topic: Improving the hammock plot for visualizing data. Sep 2025-ongoing. Awards: 1st prize for her oral presentation (Bachelor's) "Hammock plots: Visualizing Categorical and Numerical Data Together" at the 14th Annual Canadian Statistics Student Conference, Hamilton, May 2026.
Ph.D. student Topic: Visualization / explainable AI
Openings
I accept additional Master's and PhD students on a case by case basis. For incoming Master's students, a good way to connect is for you to take my course on visualization (Stat842). For Ph.D. students, please note that I will only consider students with sufficient background in statistics/ biostatistics. Currently, I am looking for students interested in visualization.
Alumni
Ph.D. Students:
- Jennifer Wong, Ph.D. (2009) Rand Graduate School. Ph.D. Dissertation in Criminology. Next position: Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. (I was the de facto advisor; formally, a well-known criminologist was named).
- Hyukjun (Jay) Gweon, Sep 2013-Sep 2017. Statistical Learning Approaches to some Classification Problems. Dissertation Link. Subsequent position: Assistant Professor, University of Illionois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently: Assistant Professor, Western University.
- Malte Schierholz, 2016-2019. New Methods for Job and Occupation Classification (Sociology; 2nd Advisor; jointly with Frauke Kreuter). Subsequent position: Federal Institute for Employment Research, Germany.
- Zhoushanyue (Sophie) He, Jan 2016-Jan 2021. On the Automatic Coding of Text Answers to Open-ended Questions in Surveys, Dissertation Link. Subsequent position: Roche Pharmaceutical Company.
- Ilia Sucholutsky, Sep 2017-June 2021, Learning from almost no data. Dissertation Link. Awards include: Concept Graduate Student Startup Fund Waterloo, AI Institute, 2021. Subsequent position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University.
Master's Students:
- Yanyang Zhao, (2012), An Overview of the Sample Design in the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Project, University of Waterloo
- Zhoushanyue (Sophie) He (2013), An exploration of final comments in the American Life Internet survey panel, University of Waterloo, Next position: ITC project, U of Waterloo
- Yu Luo (2014), Evaluation questions as predictors of attrition in the LISS survey panel, University of Waterloo
- Daniel Rodriguez (2014), A new approach for selecting training data for the classification of text data, University of Waterloo, Next position: Ottawa Research hospital, then Ph.D. student
- Cynthia McLauchlan (2015), Are Final Comments in Web Survey Panels Associated with Next-Wave Attrition?, University of Waterloo
- Yilun Zhang (2017), Sentiment Analysis of Final Comments in the LISS Panel, University of Waterloo
- Alice Hing-Yee Leung (2021), Predicting Next-Wave Attrition in Web Survey Panels by Applying Machine Learning Methods on Final Comments. University of Waterloo, Next position: LinkedIn
- Tiancheng Yang (2022), exKidneyBERT: A Language Model for Kidney Transplant Pathology Reports and the Crucial Role of Extended Vocabularies. University of Waterloo, Dissertation Link, Next position: Ph.D student.
- Carmen Alicia Liang Zhen (2026), Visualizing Joint Ranking Distributions in Network Meta-Analysis with Hammock Plots, (supervised jointly with Dr. Audrey Beliveau). Next position: Ph.D. student.
Undergraduate Students with Thesis:
- Cynthia McLauchlan (Knowledge Integration) (2014), Does taking a statistics course improve statistical literacy?, University of Waterloo
Full Time Research Assistants/ Co-op Students:
- Joey Zhang, Winter 2014, Developing Coding infrastructure for Text mining
- Nick Guenther, Spring 2015, Exploring the use of Support vector Machines in the social sciences
- Dora (Xinyue) Liu, Jan-June 2017, Respondent driven sampling for estimating Bitcoin usage (jointly with the Bank of Canada)
- Rosie (Yuyan) Zou, Spring 2017, Random forests and their implementation
- Tiancheng Yang, Spring 2018, Coding algorithms for multi-label learning