Bruce (Zhi) Wen

Applied research scientist at Mila - Quebec AI Institute

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I work in the applied research team at Mila, where we solve real-world problems with deep learning. As an example, I worked with Dialogue to develop automatic symptom detection systems, publishing our work at NeurIPS 2022, in the main track and the dataset track.

These days I am most interested in certain topics in NLP, including decoding algorithms, controllable generation, evaluation, retrieval, and interpretability. I also keep an eye on healthcare/bio applications, such as protein design.

I earned my master degree at McGill University, and I did my undergrad at Wuhan University, China. My research focused on machine learning and NLP for healthcare. For instance, I worked on COVID-19 media news surveillance for public health measures, constructing a large medical NLP pre-training dataset, among others.

I listen to jazz in the morning with coffee, post-rock or Pink Floyd when I use my brain (e.g. reading papers or coding), and shoegazing whenever I feel the need. In my free time I (used to) play soccer and (more recently) learn guitar.

selected publications

  1. NeurIPS
    Towards Trustworthy Automatic Diagnosis Systems by Emulating Doctors’ Reasoning with Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Arsene Fansi Tchango, Rishab Goel, Julien Martel, and 3 more authors
    Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022
  2. Patterns
    Inferring global-scale temporal latent topics from news reports to predict public health interventions for COVID-19
    Zhi Wen, Guido Powell, Imane Chafi, and 2 more authors
    Patterns, 2022
  3. EMNLP Workshop
    MeDAL: Medical Abbreviation Disambiguation Dataset for Natural Language Understanding Pretraining
    Zhi Wen, Xing Han Lu, and Siva Reddy
    In Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop, 2020
  4. Nat. Commun.
    Inferring multimodal latent topics from electronic health records
    Yue Li, Pratheeksha Nair, Xing Han Lu, and 8 more authors
    Nature communications, 2020