Katya Kudashkina, Tech Entrepreneur, M.B.A., Ph.D.

About me

I currently hold the position of Director, Data Analytics at Revera where I am leading the design and execution of Revera's advanced analytics strategy. I completed my Ph.D. in AI (my thesis is on model-based reinforcement learning) and had the privilege to work with Dr. Rich Sutton (at the RLAI lab at the University of Alberta), who is a founding father of modern computational approaches.

Prior to that, I've founded two startups: UDIO AgTech, and Cultura. The companies graduated from Creative Destruction Lab, Next Founders, and NextAI. I started my career at IBM (2009) working with Cognos solutions. After that I spent five years at CPP Investments (2010-2015).

At 22 years old I moved to Canada, started from scratch, received B.Sc. with honors, Computer Science from Ryerson University, and an M.B.A. from University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management. I've been working all the way through all my degrees as RA/TA at the university.

Before all of that... I grew up in the middle of Siberia, Russia, in a tiny village, which I left at 16 to pursue an Engineering degree in Saint-Petersburg at ITMO University where I completed 4yrs out of required 5.5 before moving to Canada. While working on my degree I was running a crepe restaurant in Saint-Petersburg (60 seats).

Interests

Model-based reinforcement learning, machine learning, psychology, human-computer interaction, intelligent assistants, conversational AI.

Invited Talks, Webinars & Workshops

• Invited Speaker, Reinforcement Learning and the Future of Conversational AI, January, 2022, Webinar

• Invited Speaker, TorontoMachine Learning Series Micro-Summit, July, 2019, Topic: Model-based Reinforcement Learning

• Co-organized Curiosity for DecisionMaking Workshop at the Multi-disciplinary Conference on ReinforcementLearning and Decision Making, 2019

• Invited Speaker, NeurIPS, 2018, Topic: From Lab to Startup-How to Commercialize your AI Research

• Co-organized Data Management Practices Workshop, University of Guelph, 2018

• Invited lecture at CIFAR, AIFuture Policy Lab, 2018, Topic: Foundations of AI

• Guest lecture at the University of Guelph, Fall, 2018, Topic: Modeling
 Complex Systems

• Invited Speaker, Rotman School of Management, Spring, 2018, Topic: Introduction 
to AI, a lecture for 300 students

• Invited Speaker, MachineLearning and Market for Intelligence Conference, 2016

Selected Research Talks

• Conference Talk, Modular Length Control for Sentence Generation. The 28th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning

• Tea-Time Talk, Planning with Expectation Models for Control, RLAI Lab, University of Alberta

• Research Talk, NeurIPS recap, MLRG, University of Guelph

• Tea-TimeTalk, Model-based ReinforcementLearning for an interactive Dialogue Task, RLAI Lab, University of Alberta

• Research Talk at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 2018, Topic: Advances in automatic document summarization

Media Coverage

• Interview with Anthony Lacavera, Globalive Media, 2018

• AMII School’s in for summer: Students talk Deep Learning & Reinforcement Learning Summer School 2018

• “Among CDL’s ‘graduating’ companies, which best personifies your vision?” Interview with Ajay Agrawal, Commentwise, 2018

• Axios article, featuring Elissa Strome, Executive Director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, Yoshua Bengio, and Katya Kudashkina, DLRL summer school attendee, 2018

• NextAI’s first cohort shows how far Canada’s AI scene has come in past 12 months, IT World Canada, 2017

• Interview for Rotman Morning MBA Student Profile, 2014

• Interview with The Globe and Mail, 2014

Honours and Awards

• 2020. Tim Price Alumni Community Award. The award reflects my commitment to NEXT's alumni community and the mission to create a more prosperous Canada.

• 2020. CIFAR Collaborative Research Catalyst Grant

• 2017. Arrell Scholarship

• 2015. Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award, University of Toronto. The award recognizes outstanding extra- curricular contributions.

• 2015. Top 6 in 2015 Hult Prize Challenge. Out of 59 competing international teams for innovative ideas to build a sustainable early childhood education start-up enterprise

• 2014. Dean’s Honour List, University of Toronto

• 2008, 2009, 2010. Dean’s Honour List, Ryerson University

• 2001. Silver Medal. Russia. Students who received 4 out of 5 in only one subject and the highest grade (5 out of 5) in every other subject receive a Silver Medal .

Publications and Pre-Prints

Kudashkina, K., Wan, Y., Naik, A., & Sutton, R. S. (2021) Planning with Expectation Models for Control, ArXiv:2104.08543

Kudashkina, K., Pilarski, P. M., & Sutton, R. S. (2020). Document-editing Assistants and Model-based Reinforcement Learning as a Path to Conversational AI. ArXiv: 2008.12095

Kudashkina, K., Wittek, P., Kiros, J., & Taylor, G. W. (2020). Modular Length Control for Sentence Generation. In Proceedings of the 28th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Kudashkina, K., V. Chockalingam, V., Taylor, G. W., and Bowling, M.: Sample-Efficient Model-based Actor-Critic for an Interactive Dialogue Task. ArXiv: 2004.13657

Kudashkina, K., Corradini, M., Thirunathan, P., Yada, R., & Fraser, E. (2022) Artificial Intelligence technology in food safety: A behavioral approach

Trends in Food Science & Technology 924-2244(123), 376-381, doi:10.1016/j.tifs.2022.03.021

Duncan*, E., K. Kudashkina*, K., Nixon*, A., (2018) Agricultural Research Data Governance: Principles and Pathways, Presented as a poster at the Arrell Food Summit and as oral at The 8th International Conference on Sustainability and Responsibility. (*) Equal contribution.

Ilie, S., Kudashkina, K., (2010) A model reduction technique for stochastic biochemical kinetics, Proc. of The International Conference on Bioinformatics & Computational Biology(2), CSREA Press, Las Vegas, pp. 448-453.