Amii Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair Osmar Zaïane has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association / Association pour l'Intelligence Artificielle au Canada (CAIAC) for his decades of work advancing the science of AI.

Each year, the organization honours researchers who have “distinguished themselves through outstanding research excellence in artificial Intelligence during their academic career.”

It’s the second Lifetime Achievement Award that Zaïane’s has received this year, following an honour from CS-CAN | INFO-CAN last fall. 

Zaïane’s machine learning career began in the 1990s when he became interested in the then-emerging field of data mining. He focused on understanding user behaviours in both financial and educational platforms. He was able to make significant contributions to what he calls the “canonical tasks” in data mining, including classification, clustering, and association rules.

Since then, his career has been defined not by one specific area of machine learning but rather by an intense interest in using AI to solve practical problems. That has led him to work on projects spanning all kinds of disciplines, including robotics, AI for health, and social network analysis.

Two of his most recent projects involve designing adaptive machines — which can sense when they are damaged or faulty and adjust to continue working — and ways of using machine learning for earlier diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. 

In addition to his academic work, Zaïane is known for his efforts in building and supporting the AI research community. He was the Scientific Director of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute in its early days, back when it was a part of the University of Alberta. 

Since then he has devoted time to programming many conferences and guest editing machine learning journals. But Zaïane says he is most proud of the time he has spent teaching and supervising students, where he uses his experience over a wide range of machine learning topics to help them shape their own research interests and career paths.

Zaïane is the fifth Amii Fellow to receive the CAIAC Lifetime Achievement Award, joining  Russ Greiner (2021), Robert Holte (2019), Richard Sutton (2018), and Jonathan Schaeffer (2008).