PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Boyu Wang

Boyu Wang is a machine learning researcher whose work develops methods for transfer and multitask learning. He completed a computer science PhD at McGill and carried out postdoctoral research at Princeton and Penn before joining Western in 2019. His work includes online boosting, multitask metric learning, gapBoost, research on robust and fair learning, and EvoRate for measuring patterns in sequential data. In 2025 he joined the Pin-AI drug discovery collaboration, and as of October 2026 he is an associate professor at Western and a Vector Institute faculty affiliate.

Timeline

  1. 2015

    Online boosting for transfer learning

    At McGill, he and Joelle Pineau propose two online boosting algorithms for transfer and multitask learning in 2015.

  2. By 2019

    A PhD and postdoctoral work

    He earns a computer science PhD from McGill. Before joining Western in 2019, he works as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University.

  3. 2019

    Western and Vector appointments

    In 2019, he joins Western University's Department of Computer Science in a tenure-track role and becomes a Vector Institute Faculty Affiliate.

  4. 2019

    Metric learning and gapBoost

    At AISTATS 2019, he and his coauthors prove generalization bounds for multitask metric learning and present an efficient boosting-based mt-BML algorithm. The NeurIPS 2019 paper with Jorge Mendez, Mingbo Cai, and Eric Eaton defines a performance gap between source and target domains and introduces gapBoost for transfer learning.

  5. 2022

    Robustness and fairness

    In 2022, he presents three works on trustworthy machine learning at a TrustML Young Scientist Seminar. The talk examines robust representations under distribution shift and label noise, plus invariant representations for fairness.

  6. 2024

    Evolving patterns in sequential data

    In 2024, he coauthors a NeurIPS paper that introduces EvoRate, a mutual-information measure for the intensity of evolving patterns in sequential data. It also proposes an optimal-transport method to match data snapshots when correspondence is missing.

  7. November 2025

    AI for Pin1 drug discovery

    In November 2025, he is part of the Pin-AI collaboration with Western researchers and Olivier Sperandio of the Pasteur Institute. He and Pingzhao Hu lead efforts to build an AI model that analyzes more than 100 million compounds to find potential Pin1 inhibitors.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at Western

    As of October 2026, he is an associate professor in Western University's Department of Computer Science and a Vector Institute faculty affiliate. His research interests span machine learning theory, algorithms, and applications.

Career

  1. Since 2019Western UniversityAssociate Professor
  2. Since 2019Vector InstituteFaculty Affiliate
  3. University of PennsylvaniaPostdoctoral Fellow
  4. Princeton UniversityPostdoctoral Fellow

Education

  1. McGill UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Vector Institute. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. Nonprofit roles are 2.3 times as common in AI safetyIncludes Vector Institute. We estimate where people focused on safety, alignment and evaluation work. Nonprofit roles appear for 25.1% of safety people with known affiliations, compared with 11.0% in other areas.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Vector Institute. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Vector Institute. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Boyu Wang yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Online Boosting Algorithms for Anytime Transfer and Multitask Learning ojs.aaai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Boyu Wang - Computer Science - Western University csd.uwo.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Lifelong Machine Learning Research Group - Team lifelongml.seas.upenn.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Vector Institute Names 29 New Faculty Affiliates - Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence vectorinstitute.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Multitask Metric Learning: Theory and Algorithm proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Transfer Learning via Minimizing the Performance Gap Between Domains proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Talk : TrustML Young Scientist Seminars trustmlresearch.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Towards Understanding Evolving Patterns in Sequential Data proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Using AI to discover new drugs for fighting cancer and infectious disease news.westernu.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Boyu Wang - Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence vectorinstitute.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.