Research Areas and Groups¶
Last verified: October 2026.
Who does what in the department, so you know whose papers to read before you send an email. Areas and names come from the department's research area pages; every person below was checked against their current UofA directory profile, and each one-liner comes from their profile or lab site. This is not every faculty member. Faculty move and retire, so check the profile before you email.
For how to approach someone and how to get paid for it, see Getting Into Research.
Reinforcement learning¶
The best-known group here is the RLAI lab. Sutton and Andrew Barto won the 2024 ACM Turing Award for the foundations of RL, and their textbook is the standard one.
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Rich Sutton | Reinforcement learning as an approach to AI; general principles of goal-directed agents |
| Michael Bowling | Multiagent learning, game theory, games; leads the Computer Poker Research Group |
| Csaba Szepesvári | Learning theory, bandits, online learning |
| Martha White | RL systems that keep learning during deployment: representation learning, off-policy learning, planning |
| Adam White | Continual learning, RL, robotics; RLAI PI and Amii Director |
| Marlos C. Machado | RL, especially exploration with temporally extended actions (options) |
| Rupam Mahmood | Continual RL on real robots with onboard compute |
| Matthew Taylor | Intelligent Robot Learning Lab: RL, human-in-the-loop AI, multiagent systems |
| Dale Schuurmans | Machine learning, optimization, search (also a Research Director at Google DeepMind) |
| Patrick Pilarski | RL for prosthetics and rehabilitation (Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, Amii) |
Courses to take first: CMPUT 365 (Intro to RL), CMPUT 267 and CMPUT 466 (ML).
For undergrads: RLAI's Tea Time Talks run through the summer (2026: June 17 to end of August, in UCOMM 2-108) and "everyone is welcome." Showing up is the cheapest way to learn who works on what.
Machine learning and AI (beyond RL)¶
Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) is the umbrella institute most of these people belong to. It is not a single lab.
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Russ Greiner | ML for medicine: survival prediction, medical informatics |
| Nidhi Hegde | Privacy, fairness and bias in ML |
| Alona Fyshe | How brains and models represent meaning (ML + neuroscience + language) |
| Randy Goebel | Knowledge representation and reasoning, explainable AI |
| Jia-Huai You | Declarative problem solving and knowledge representation |
| Osmar Zaïane | Data mining, text and web mining; Amii Scientific Director |
Course: CMPUT 469 (AI Capstone) is a team project on a real-world AI/ML task, often with a domain expert.
Heuristic search and games¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Martin Müller | Heuristic search, planning, computer Go (the Fuego program) |
| Nathan Sturtevant | Heuristic and combinatorial search, search for game design |
| Vadim Bulitko | Heuristic search, program synthesis |
| Levi Lelis | Search for programmatic solutions (program synthesis for policies and strategies) |
| Matthew Guzdial | GRAIL lab: creative AI, procedural content generation for games |
| Ryan Hayward | Algorithms for two-player games (Hex, Go) and graph theory |
Courses: CMPUT 250 (Computers and Games), CMPUT 256 (Game AI), CMPUT 350 (Advanced Games Programming), CMPUT 455 (Search, Knowledge and Simulation).
Natural language processing¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Denilson Barbosa | Knowledge extraction, information retrieval, NLP |
| Greg Kondrak | Computational linguistics: transliteration, cognates, deciphering unknown scripts |
| Lili Mou | Deep learning for language understanding and generation |
| Xi Ye | LLM reasoning and explainability, coding agents |
| Davood Rafiei | DALI lab: natural language interfaces to data, LLMs over structured data |
Alona Fyshe (above) and Carrie Demmans Epp (below) also work on language.
Courses: CMPUT 461 (Intro to NLP), CMPUT 361 (Information Retrieval).
Databases and data mining¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Davood Rafiei | Data integration, entity resolution, querying web and structured data |
| Jörg Sander | Density-based clustering, outlier detection, spatial data mining |
| Osmar Zaïane | Data mining, multimedia and web mining |
Courses: CMPUT 291, CMPUT 391.
Human-computer interaction and learning technologies¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Carrie Demmans Epp | EdTeKLA group: educational and language-learning technology, learning analytics |
| Majeed Kazemitabaar | Human-AI interaction, AI tools for programming and learning. His profile says he is recruiting at all levels, undergrads included |
| Bailey Kacsmar | Human-centred privacy technology |
Course: CMPUT 302 (Intro to HCI).
Software engineering and programming languages¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Abram Hindle | Empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, software energy use |
| Ken Wong | Reverse engineering, program understanding, software evolution |
| Zhou Yang | Trustworthy code LLMs: robustness, security, privacy |
| Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen | PEAR lab: program synthesis and AI-assisted programming |
| Eleni Stroulia | Service systems, smart buildings, software for health care |
Courses: CMPUT 301, CMPUT 401, CMPUT 402, CMPUT 416 (Program Analysis).
Systems, compilers and networks¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| J. Nelson Amaral | Compiler optimization, high-performance computing |
| Paul Lu | Parallel and distributed systems, cloud, high-performance data transfer |
| Omid Ardakanian | Cyber-physical systems, IoT, energy systems |
| Ioanis (Yannis) Nikolaidis | Network protocols, wireless sensor networks |
| Ehab Elmallah | Algorithms and models for network design and reliability |
Courses: CMPUT 379, CMPUT 313, CMPUT 415, CMPUT 429, CMPUT 481.
Privacy and security¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Bailey Kacsmar | Privacy in ML, private computation |
| Euijin Choo | Data-driven cyber security (read her site's instructions before emailing) |
| Nidhi Hegde | Privacy-preserving ML |
Courses: CMPUT 333 (Security), CMPUT 331 (Computational Cryptography).
Algorithms and theory¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Mohammad Salavatipour | Approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation (also Department Chair) |
| Zachary Friggstad | Approximation algorithms for routing, facility location, scheduling |
| Guohui Lin | Approximation algorithms, computational biology |
| Xiaoqi Tan | SODALab: online algorithms, algorithmic economics. Looking for students at all levels; the weekly SODALab seminar is open to anyone at UofA |
Courses: CMPUT 204, CMPUT 304, CMPUT 403.
Vision, graphics, multimedia and robotics¶
| Faculty | Works on |
|---|---|
| Martin Jagersand | Vision-guided robot manipulation, 3D modelling from video |
| Nilanjan Ray | Medical image analysis, computer vision, deep learning |
| Anup Basu | 3D vision and graphics, multimedia |
| Irene Cheng | Multimedia computing; Scientific Director of the Multimedia Research Centre |
Mahmood and Taylor (RL section) also run robot-learning work.
Courses: CMPUT 312 (Robotics), CMPUT 412 (Mobile Robotics), CMPUT 428 (Computer Vision), CMPUT 411 (Graphics).
Bioinformatics¶
Listed on the department's bioinformatics page: Guohui Lin (algorithms for computational biology), Russ Greiner (medical ML), and David Wishart (metabolomics; Biological Sciences).
Where to look for openings¶
- The department's Student Research Opportunities board (often empty; most positions are never posted).
- Faculty profiles: several above say outright that they take undergrads or link a "prospective students" page. Read it before emailing.
- Many profiles list a CMPUT 399 or 499 individual-study section, which is how a lot of undergrad research starts.