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WELCOME TO ESTER LAB
MACHINE LEARNING AND DATA MINING RESEARCH GROUP
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
Principal Investigator
Principal Investigator
Welcome! My name is Martin Ester, and I am a Professor of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. I got my Diplom (M.Sc.) in Computer Science from University of Dortmund, Germany, in 1984 and my Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1990.
I am a co-director of the Databases and Data Mining Laboratory and member of the Omics Data Science Research Cluster. My research interests are in Data Mining and Machine Learning, in particular causal pattern discovery, transfer learning, network analysis, and recommender systems. Much of my research is driven by bio-medical applications such as patient stratification and drug response prediction. Our methods are typically based on Probabilistic Graphical Models and Deep Neural Networks.
Since my move to Vancouver in 2001, I am enjoying "Beautiful BC" and especially the many hiking trails around the Vancouver area. Our campus lies in the middle of the "wilderness" of the Burnaby Mountain conservation area, and I am commuting to and from work on my mountain bike.
NEWS
NEWS
Recent Updates
Recent Updates
Jun. 2024. Congratulations to Ali Arab on successfully defending his Ph.D. Thesis, titles, Knowledge Discovery: from Correlation to Causation.
Sep. 2023. Congratulations to Amirreza Kazemi on successfully defending his MSc Thesis, titled Deep Representation Learning for Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation!
Sep. 2023. Welcome our new Ph.D. student, Ali Izadi!
Mar. 2023. Congratulations to Dr. Raquel Aoki on successfully defending her Ph.D Thesis, titled Causal Inference for Computational Biology!
Jan. 2023. Congratulations to Atia Hamidizadeh on successfully defending her MSc Thesis, titled Semi-Supervised Junction Tree Variational Autoencoder for Molecular Graphs!
Aug. 2022. The Ester Lab would like to congratulate Dr. Oliver Snow on successfully defending his Ph.D. Thesis, titled Interactive Machine Learning for Scarce Molecular Datasets!
Jun. 2022. The Ester Lab would like to congratulate Lai Wei on successfully defending his MSc Thesis, titled Combining Graph Attention Mechanism and PageRank to Learn Graph-level Representations!
Apr. 2022. The Ester Lab would like to congratulate Dr. Mehrdad Mansouri on successfully defending his Ph.D. Thesis, titled Causal Discovery from High-dimensional Observational Data!
Jobs Updates
Jobs Updates
Feb 2024 - Congrats to Amirreza Kazemi for her new position as an Machine Learning Engineer at Huawei, Montreal Office - Canada
Jun 2023 - Congrats to Atia Hamidizadeh for her new position as an Associate Machine Learning Researcher at Huawei, Montreal Office - Canada
Sep 2022 - Congrats to Lai Wei for his new position as Software Engineer at Amazon, Vancouver Office - Canada.
Jan 2022 - Congrats to Atia Hamidizadeh for her new position as an intern at Borealis AI, Toronto Office - Canada.
Sep 2021 - Congrats to Lai Wei on his new position as an intern at Huawei, Toronto Office - Canada.
Sep 2021 - Congrats to Hossein Sharifi for his new position as an AI4Life Resident at Novartis - Switzerland.
Aug 2021 - Congrats to Oliver Snow for his new position as a Machine Learning Researcher at Terramera, Vancouver Office - Canada.
Jul 2021 - Congrats to Jialin Liu for his new position as a Software Engineer at Huawei, Vancouver Office - Canada.
May 2021 - Congrats to Raquel Aoki for her new position as a Research Intern at Google Brain, Cambridge Office - US.
Recent Publications - Last 24 months
Recent Publications - Last 24 months
[Paper] Arash Khoeini, Funda Sar, Yen-Yi Lin, Colin Collins, and Martin Ester. "scMUSCL: multi-source transfer learning for clustering scRNA-seq data." Bioinformatics 41, no. 5 (2025).
[Paper] Seonghwan Seo, Minsu Kim, Tony Shen, Martin Ester, Jinkyoo Park, Sungsoo Ahn, Woo Youn Kim. "Generative Flows on Synthetic Pathway for Drug Design", ICLR 2025
[Paper] Arash Khoeini, Shuman Peng, Martin Ester. "Informed Augmentation Selection Improves Tabular Contrastive Learning" PAKDD 2025: 306-318
[Paper] Yuzhen Mao, Yen-Yi Lin, Nelson K. Y. Wong, Stanislav Volik, Funda Sar, Colin C. Collins, Martin Ester. "Phenotype prediction from single-cell RNA-seq data using attention-based neural networks", Bioinform. 40(2) (2024)
[Paper] Ali Arab, Bahareh Kashani, Miguel Cordova-Delgado, Erika N. Scott, Kaveh Alemi, Jessica Trueman, Gabriella Groeneweg, Wan-Chun Chang, Catrina M. Loucks, Colin J. D. Ross, Bruce C. Carleton, Martin Ester. "Machine learning model identifies genetic predictors of cisplatin-induced ototoxicity in CERS6 and TLR4", Comput. Biol. Medicine 183: 109324 (2024)
[Paper] Tony Shen, Seonghwan Seo, Grayson Lee, Mohit Pandey, Jason R. Smith, Artem Cherkasov, Woo Youn Kim, Martin Ester. "TacoGFN: Target-conditioned GFlowNet for Structure-based Drug Design", Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. 2024
[Paper] Amirreza Kazemi, Martin Ester. "Adversarially Balanced Representation for Continuous Treatment Effect Estimation", AAAI 2024: 13085-13093
[Paper] Oliver Snow, Amirreza Kazemi, Forum Bhanshali, Alyas Nasiri, Annett Rozek, and Martin Ester. "Identifying Synergistic Components of Botanical Fungicide Formulations Using Interpretable Graph Neural Networks", Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 2024
[Paper] Yuzhen Mao, Martin Ester, and Ke Li. "IceFormer: Accelerated Inference with Long-Sequence Transformers on CPUs", International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
[Poster] Shuman Peng, Parsa Alamzadeh, and Martin Ester. "Better Calibration Error Estimation for Reliable Uncertainty Quantification", Workshop on Interpretable ML in Healthcare at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.
[Poster] Atia Hamidizadeh, Tony Shen and Martin Ester. "Semi-Supervised Junction Tree Variational Autoencoder for Molecular Graphs", Workshop on Deep Learning on Graphs: Method and Applications, AAAI 2023.
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