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Graham Taylor
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning, University of Guelph
- Professor and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning, University of Guelph12
- Faculty Member, Vector Institute12
Graham Taylor is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning at the University of Guelph, where Taylor leads the Machine Learning Research Group and co-directs the Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical AI (CARE-AI), and a faculty member at the Vector Institute. The group develops deep learning methods spanning generative modelling, multimodal representation learning across images, DNA, and text, graph neural networks, and uncertainty quantification, much of it motivated by monitoring biodiversity. Taylor's CV lists a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University's Courant Institute from 2009 to 2012 and a 2018–2019 term as Visiting Faculty at Google Brain. Taylor is a co-author of BIOSCAN-5M, a multimodal insect dataset that pairs specimen images with DNA barcode sequences and taxonomic labels.123
At a glance
- Current roles
- Professor and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning +1 more
- Companies
- University of Guelph, Vector Institute
- Sector
- University
- Education
- NYU, Toronto
- Work listed
- 1
- Honors
- 4
- Sources cited
- 3
- Profile reviewed
Career
Taylor's CV records a PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2009, advised by Geoffrey Hinton and Sam Roweis, with a thesis on composable, distributed-state models for high-dimensional time series. Taylor then spent 2009 to 2012 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Vision, Learning and Graphics group at NYU's Courant Institute, working with Chris Bregler, Rob Fergus and Yann LeCun.2
Taylor joined the University of Guelph's School of Engineering as an assistant professor in 2012, became associate professor in 2017 and professor in 2021. Taylor was founding academic director of Guelph's Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical AI (CARE-AI) from 2018 and has been its academic co-director since 2020. At the Vector Institute, Taylor has been a faculty member since 2017 and served as interim research director and then research director between 2021 and 2023.2
Outside the university, Taylor co-founded Kindred Systems in 2014, has been a lab scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab since 2018, and is founding academic director of NextAI at NEXT Canada.2
Research
Taylor's research areas include representation learning and deep learning, unsupervised learning and time series, applied to image and video understanding, motion capture, remote sensing and agri-food, and biodiversity. The group's current work covers generative modelling, multimodal representation learning across images, DNA and text, graph neural networks and uncertainty quantification.21
Much of the recent work supports biodiversity monitoring. BIOSCAN-5M pairs insect specimen images with DNA barcode sequences and taxonomic labels, and in 2026 a team led by Taylor's postdoctoral fellow Scott Lowe placed second in a fish species recognition challenge at the ECCV workshop on computer vision for ecology.32
Work and contributions
BIOSCAN-5M: A Multimodal Dataset for Insect Biodiversity Published research
Co-author of the paper presenting BIOSCAN-5M (journal reference NeurIPS 2024), with benchmark experiments that include pretraining a masked language model on DNA barcode sequences.31
Timeline
- Completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto, advised by Geoffrey Hinton and Sam Roweis.2
- Began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.2
- Joined the University of Guelph's School of Engineering as an assistant professor.2
- Co-founded Kindred Systems, serving in academic relations until 2020.2
- Became a faculty member of the Vector Institute and an associate professor at Guelph.2
- Became founding academic director of Guelph's Centre for Advancing Responsible and Ethical AI.2
- Served as Visiting Faculty at Google Brain, through 2019.2
- Became professor in Guelph's Department of Interdisciplinary Engineering and interim research director at Vector.2
- Served as research director of the Vector Institute until 2023.2
- Co-authored BIOSCAN-5M, a multimodal dataset for insect biodiversity.3
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (2009–2012), New York University2
- Visiting Faculty, Google Brain (2018–2019), Google2
- Co-founder and academic relations (2014–2020), Kindred Systems2
Honors and recognition
Where they work
- University of Guelph 1 person in the wiki
- Vector Institute 4 people in the wiki
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References
3 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026