Lassonde grad and Zillow algorithm contest winner to give a guest lecture, March 25

Stan Humphries (left), Zillow chief analytics officer, presents a cheque to Nima Shahbazi, a member of the team that won the Zillow Prize. Photo courtesy of Zillow

Lassonde School of Engineering grad Nima Shahbazi (PhD ’18) recently made international news after winning the $1-million grand prize for beating the Zillow algorithm (to learn more, see the Feb. 11 YFile news story). Shahbazi is returning to Lassonde on March 25 to give a special lecture about his journey through academia, how he became a Kaggle GrandMaster and Algo Trader, and his Zillow contest win. He will share insights on his experience working on machine and deep learning competitions and discuss the idea behind his startup Mindle.ai, which provides artificial intelligence-enabled capital market signals for hedge funds.

The lecture is free and everyone is welcome to attend. It will begin at 1 p.m. in Room 125, Bergeron Centre for Engineering Excellence at the Keele Campus.

The lecture will be of specific interest to those who are curious about machine learning, data science and the world of startups. Shahbazi will give advice about how to enter a Kaggle competition and why such competitions are important.

Shahbazi is an artificial intelligence scientist and CEO of Mindle.ai. He received his PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in the Lassonde School of Engineering.