Research Group

• 
  Gradon Nicholls

  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.

• 
  Tiancheng Yang

  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.

• 
  Sandra Huang

  Co-op student/ research assistant. Undergraduate student with a Computer Science major. Topic: Improving the hammock plot for visualizing data. Sep 2025-ongoing.

Openings

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.

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