Hello! Bonjour! سلام!

Update (December 2022): Watch my video clip in support of the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

I’m Abbas Mehrabian, a mathematician, freelance journalist, and Google DeepMind research scientist living in Montreal.

These activities instill meaning in my life: creating beautiful content, learning new skills, pushing my limits, building connections with others, and spending time in nature.

Find me on social media or email me at abbas dot mehrabian at gmail dot com.

Biography

I was born in Pakistan in 1986, raised in Iran, and moved to Canada in 2009.

Since June 2021, I am a research scientist in artificial intelligence at Google DeepMind’s Montreal team led by Doina Precup.

With a PhD in mathematics and a graduate diploma in journalism, I have years of experience in academic research in mathematics and computer science, and I have done journalism in both English and Persian.

I love travelling, and I had lived in Tehran, Waterloo (Ontario), Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, and Berkeley (California) before coming to Montreal in 2017.

My hobbies include camping, cycling, reading, and photography.

Journalism

At age 33, I started doing journalism because I wanted to learn more about Canadian society and have a broader impact.

So, I completed a graduate diploma in journalism at Concordia University, interned at Broadview magazine for four months, and I’m now a freelance journalist and a member of Quebec Writers' Federation, the Canadian Association of Journalists, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

At age 36, I started a Persian podcast, این قصه منه (This is My Story).

I’m interested in writing human interest stories and, in particular, social justice stories. See my English publications, English essays, and Persian publications.

Mathematics and computer science

I received a PhD in mathematics in 2015, and I have worked in areas such as probability theory, randomized algorithms, random matrices, random graphs, and graph theory.

My focus has been on the theoretical aspects of machine learning since 2016. Two of my best publications were:

• The sample complexity of learning Gaussian mixtures, published in the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (JACM) and won a best-paper award at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2018), and

• VC-dimensions of neural networks, published in the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2017) and the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).

Check out my research projects and research publications (or DBLP or Google Scholar).

Awards

1. Governor General’s Gold Medal for the best PhD thesis at University of Waterloo, 2015

2. IVADO Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2018–2020 ($90,000 per year)

3. Best-Paper Award at 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, out of 4856 submissions

4. Sportsnet Diploma Scholarship in Journalism for the personal essay Love Your Neighbour as Yourself, 2021

Other joyful activities

• I made a video clip with English subtitles, in December 2022, for the Persian song The Daughters of The Land of The Sun, created by anonymous artists to support the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran.

• I gave a talk in Tek Talk in January 2022, explaining what kinds of activities bring joy to my life: they all involve creating, exploring, or connecting.

• I raised $1000 to fight kids' cancer by cycling 650 kilometres in August 2021, including a round trip from Montreal to Ottawa.

• I toured the Montreal Island on bike in June 2021.

• I was the sound designer for the Persian play Facts About Leila Daughter of Idris. We performed three times in Montreal and once in Ottawa.

• I taught a math course at McGill in 2017; on Halloween, I wore a Charlie Chaplin costume in class.

• From 2018 to 2020, I organized Docunight@Montreal, a monthly documentary club.

• I anchored a mock 16-minute TV newscast and made a 3-minute video report for the advanced video journalism course at Concordia.

• I anchored Concordia radio’s morning 15-minute newscast on November 10, 2020.

• I made English subtitles for the documentary Siah (Black) by Mahmoud Azimaee.

• In 2019, I volunteered two hours each week at Welcome Hall Mission’s emergency shelter.

• I co-produced a podcast episode in Persian about persons with disabilities.

• During the 2020 Christmas break, I co-produced 13 local radio newscasts in Persian, called Radio Tatilat.

• I received my PhD from UWaterloo (supervised by Nick Wormald and Joseph Cheriyan) and held visitor research positions at Monash University (host: Nick Wormald), UBC (host: Nick Harvey), SFU (host: Petra Berenbrink), UC Berkeley, and McGill (hosts: Luc Devroye and Louigi Addario-Berry).

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