Hello! Bonjour! سلام!

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. To discover more, read my 8-page personal essay (updated in December 2023) or watch the first 25 minutes of my talk (from January 2022).

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, living in Montreal since 2017.

I am an artificial-intelligence researcher in the computer science team at Google DeepMind, whose goal is to use machine learning to discover new knowledge in mathematics and computer science.

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.

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

Since 2021, my focus has been on using AI to advance mathematics. Check out my research projects and research publications (or DBLP or Google Scholar).

From 2015 to 2021, I studied theoretical aspects of machine learning. 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).

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.

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

• In 2025, I took the pledge to give 10 percent of my salary to charity.

• I cycled the 90-km ride from London to Brighton in 2024.

• I talked about joys and challenges of immigrating to Canada with Masoud Valinejadshoubi in 2023 (in Persian).

• I made a video clip with English subtitles, in 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 2022, explaining what kinds of activities bring joy to my life: they all involve creating, exploring, or connecting. Read my 8-page personal essay (updated in 2023) for a text version.

• 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 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).