The Department of Statistics Award in Data Science recognizes the importance of developing and applying tools to answer important questions through the analysis of data and is offered annually to an undergraduate or graduate student who has demonstrated initiative and creativity in making outstanding contributions to the field of Data Science. Recipients can be from any undergraduate or graduate program at UBC-Vancouver.
Congratulations, to the 2024 awardee, Farhan Samir! Farhan is in his fourth year of a Ph.D. in computational linguistics. He holds an NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship and an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship for his future postdoc studies. His advisor is Professor Jian Zhu.
Farhan's impressive pedigree includes publications in top natural language processing venues, including EMNLP, NAACL, and ACL. In a notable recent paper that attracted media attention, he introduced InfoGap, a method to detect knowledge gaps and inconsistencies between different language versions of the same article. Other important applications include knowledge transfer in tech companies' multilingual large language models and, in collaboration with Wikipedia, showing readers complementary facts from versions of the article in other languages.
To learn more about this award and previous award recipients, please see:
https://www.stat.ubc.ca/data-science-award
Linguistics Ph.D. student Farhan Samir wins 2024-25 Data Science Award
April 1, 2025