Adding ‘statistical flavour’ to machine learning research

For Dr. Linglong Kong, machine learning and statistics are forever entwined — to build the best artificial intelligence models means understanding the data they are learning from. Linglong’s statistics training is the foundation of his work in areas such as deep learning and distributed reinforcement learning, as well as using artificial intelligence to better analyze medical data and protect patient privacy. His work with quantile regression and robust statistics has him studying how to improve datasets to help optimize machine learning, such as reducing racial and gender bias in data used for social work.

Linglong started his statistics training at Beijing Normal University, before getting his M.Sc. in Probability and Statistics from Peking University. He then moved to the University of Alberta to finish his PhD in Statistics. Much of his early work focused on biostatistic research with the U of A, and later, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Linglong is a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He is a fellow of American Statistical Association (ASA) and a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). His publication record includes more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in top journals such as AOS, JASA and JRSSB as well as top conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICDM, AAAI, and IJCAI.

Linglong currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Annals of Applied Statistics, the Canadian Journal of Statistics, and Statistics and its Interface. Additionally, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society, chair of the ASA Statistical Computing Session program, and chair of the webinar committee. He served as a guest editor of Canadian Journal of Statistics and Statistics and its Interface, associate editor of  International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, guest associate editor of Frontiers of Neurosciences, chair of the ASA Statistical Imaging Session, and member of the Statistics Society of Canada's Board of Directors.