Elliot Creager
Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. Faculty Affiliate at Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Welcome to my humble homepage!
I am the director of the Socially Embedded Machine Intelligence (SEMI) lab, where my research focuses on building reliable and equitable AI systems that promote user data autonomy. Located in Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering, my research group takes an instrumentalist approach to developing socially beneficial AI technology.
I am always looking for motivated students at all levels to help me realize this vision. I draw inspiration from many disciplines (from deep learning to sociology and beyond) in order train researchers who are not only technically proficient, but who think holistically and critically about the social impacts of their work. More information about how to join SEMI can be found here.
current students
- Joshua Hill (Ugrad)
- Rebecca Ma (MASc)
- Rushabh Solanki (MAsc)
- Huy Trinh (MASc, co-supervised by Prof. George Shaker)
former students
- Areena Akhter (Ugrad ‘24)
- Violetta Bilynska (Intern ‘24)
news
| Jun 13, 2024 |  I gave a talk on model adaptation and data coordination as part of the Waterloo.AI Seminar Series |
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| May 23, 2024 |  I was awarded a CIFAR AI Catalyst Grant to work with Golnoosh Farnadi on Algorithmic Auditing. |
| May 1, 2024 |  Two papers accepted at ICML 2024: Remembering to Be Fair: Non-Markovian Fairness in Sequential Decision Making and Out of the Ordinary: Spectrally Adapting Regression for Covariate Shift! |
| Apr 11, 2024 | I am hiring a postdoc (jointly supervised Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari) to investigate the internal representations of foundation models. |
| Mar 15, 2024 | I gave an invited guest lecture at Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari’s “AI Fairness and Debiasing” course (York University). |
| Mar 14, 2024 | I gave an invited guest lecture at Nisarg Shah’s “Mathematical Foundations of Algorithmic Fairness” course (University of Toronto). |
| Dec 14, 2023 |  I led (along with Stephen Pfohl) a roundtable discussion at the NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Algorithmic Fairness Through the Lens of Time. |
| Nov 13, 2023 | I gave an invited talk at the lab meeting of Prof. Golnoosh Farnadi |
| Nov 10, 2023 | I gave an invited talk at the workshop on “Forging a Path: Causal Inference and Data Science for Improved Policy”, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Data Science Institute |
| Oct 30, 2023 |  “Remembering to Be Fair: On Non-Markovian Fairness in Sequential Decision Making” (preprint forthcoming) was accepted to the NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Algorithmic Fairness Through the Lens of Time! |
| Sep 1, 2023 |  I have joined University of Waterloo as an Assistant Professor. |
| Aug 21, 2023 |  After passing my final oral examination (external thesis defense), I have now completed my PhD! |
| Jul 19, 2023 |  I will be joining University of Waterloo’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an Assistant Professor this fall! |
| Jul 13, 2023 |  SurfsUp was accepted to ICCV 2023! |
| Jul 10, 2023 |  I gave an invited talk at Vector Institute’s Machine Learning Security and Privacy Workshop. |
| Jun 22, 2023 |  I attended the SRI’s Absolutely Interdisciplinary conference in Toronto. |
| Jun 19, 2023 |  “Out of the Ordinary: Spectrally Adapting Regression for Covariate Shift” (preprint forthcoming) was accepted to the ICML 2023 Workshop on Spurious Correlations, Invariance, and Stability! |
| Jun 16, 2023 |  I attended FAccT 2023 in Chicago. |
| May 31, 2023 |  I passed my department thesis examination, where I successfully defended my thesis “Robust Machine Learning by Transforming and Augmenting Imperfect Training Data”. |
| Apr 27, 2023 | I gave an invited talk at the Mila reading group DEFirst, which studies fairness and explainability in information retrieval. |
| Apr 24, 2023 |  I served as panelist for an event on “Generative AI and the future of education” hosted by SRI and OISE. |
| Apr 13, 2023 | SurfsUp, a neural fluid simulator that can generalize OOD by simulating how fluids interact with novel surfaces, is available as a preprint. |
| Feb 25, 2023 |  I discussed the ethics of AI research with Grade 12 students as a panelist for Pursue STEM. |
| Feb 2, 2023 |  I attended the annual Algorithmic Fairness meeting at the Simons Institute in NYC |
| Dec 5, 2022 | I co-presented the tutorial Algorithmic Fairness: at the Intersections at NeurIPS 2022 |
| Nov 17, 2022 | I gave an invited talk (“Methods for Counterfactual Data Augmentation in RL”) at Vector Institute. |
| Nov 7, 2022 |  I was named as a “Top Reviewer” of NeurIPS 2022 papers |
| Nov 6, 2022 | I am now on the job market! Searching for faculty, industry and post-doc positions… |
| Sep 14, 2022 | “MoCoDA: Model-based Counterfactual Data Augmentation” was accepted to NeurIPS 2022 |
| Sep 2, 2022 | I will be co-presenting the NeurIPS 2022 tutorial “Algorithmic Fairness: at the Intersections” alongside Golnoosh Farnadi and Q. Vera Liao |