Transfer Learning, Agents for Science and Precision Medicine

Martin Ester received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1989 with a thesis on knowledge-based systems and logic programming.

After his PhD studies, he has gained four years of industry experience as Senior Systems Engineer for Swissair, Zurich, developing expert systems. In 1993, he returned to academia and joined University of Munich as a (non-tenure track) Assistant Professor. Since November 2001, he has been an Associate Professor, now Full Professor at the School of Computing Science of Simon Fraser University. From May 2010 to April 2015, he has served as the School Director. Dr. Ester has published extensively in the top conferences and journals of his field such as ACM SIGKDD, WWW, AAAI, and ICLR.

According to Google Scholar, his publications have received more than 80,000 citations with an h-index of 76. He received the KDD 2014 Test of Time Award for his paper on DBSCAN. He has been a Fellow of the RSC since 2019 and a Distinguished SFU Professor since 2021. Martin Ester’s research interests have been broadly in the areas of data mining and machine learning, with a current focus on transfer learning, continual learning, trustworthy LLMs, agents for science, and generative molecule models. Dr. Ester is committed to the translation of his research results into practical applications, in particular biomedical applications.

He holds an honorary appointment as Senior Research Scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Center and has collaborated with life scientists including Dr Collins, Dr. Cherkasov and Dr. Carleton on machine learning methods for precision oncology, including drug response prediction, cell type discovery and annotation, discovery of genetic causes of adverse drug reactions, virtual screening and generative molecule models.