Aristides Milios

Sections: Education, Teaching, Work Experience, Leadership, Awards and Scholarships, Academic Publications

Knowledgeable about…

deep learning and neural networks, specifically large language models (BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-series)
entrepreneurship and innovation (through startup, Shad Valley, Stanford’s University Innovation Fellows Program, and presidential role in Dalhousie Entrepreneurship Society)
full-stack web design and web system architecture (Python, React, PostgreSQL)

Education

M.Sc. in Computer Science, McGill University, 2022

Admitted to the M.Sc. program at McGill University under Dr. Siva Reddy. Co-supervised by Dr. Dzmitry Bahdanau.

researching large pre-trained language models and knowledge augmentations
see Section Awards for funding details
cGPA of 4.0/4.0

Bachelor of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, 2020

First Class Honours with Co-op

graduated with First Class Honours and GPA of 4.13/4.3, in top 10% of class
wrote Honours Thesis on NLP topic (novel compact pre-trained BERT embedding), supervised by Dr. Stan Matwin
Awarded Entrepreneurial Skills Certificate by the Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship (Faculty of Management), through the Entrepreneurial Skills Program

Teaching

Fall 2022: Teaching Assistant at McGill University

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

worked as a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Siva Reddy for course COMP 599 “Natural Language Understanding with Deep Learning/Computational Semantics”
designed an assignment from scratch on RNN/LSTM/BiLSTM networks - students implemented cells using basic PyTorch building blocks

Fall and Winter 2021: Teaching Assistant at Dalhousie University

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

CSCI 3162 Digital Media, with Dr. Dirk Arnold (Winter 2021)
CSCI 3141 Foundations of Data Science using R, with Dr. Luis Torgo (Fall 2020)
CSCI 2170 Server-side Scripting, with Dr. Bonnie MacKay (Fall 2020)
CSCI 2141 Intro to Database Systems, with Dr. Khurram Aziz (Fall 2020)

Work Experience

January 2021 to August 2023: Contractor at NACO Canada

designed a system to one-touch automate the generation of tables and graphs for the NACO yearly investment report using Colab, Pandas, PyExcel, and Matplotlib/Plotly

Winter 2021: Student Researcher at Dalhousie University

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Research assistantship with Dr. Luis Torgo, researching healthcare-related time series clustering and classification
Research assistantship with Dr. Stan Matwin, researching large pre-trained language models and the societal risks they pose (resulted in survey paper, see Publications)

Fall 2019: Research Intern at Know-Center GmbH

Graz, Austria

Third co-op work term of degree at Dalhousie
Researched Active Learning techniques for Recommender Systems, RNNs with Attention
Worked on existing research project “RiskID”, wrote an ML backend in Keras, implemented an Attention-based visualization and an Active Learning-based mode of function
Helped design a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of the changes to the tool

Summer 2018, Winter 2019: Research Intern at MarineTraffic Inc./Dalhousie University

Athens, Greece

research collaboration between the Institute for Big Data Analytics at Dalhousie University and MarineTraffic Inc
did research involving fusion of AIS data streams and radar and optical-based satellite imagery for better maritime awareness
first and second internship as part of degree at Dalhousie
resulted in presentation at CTFG workshop in Ottawa, a full paper at FUSION 2019 Conference, and a full paper at the Maritime Situational Awareness Workshop in La Spezia, Italy (see Publications)

Leadership

VP Communications, Computer Science Graduate Society

VP Communications for the academic year 2022-2023
handled all the society’s communications with its constituents (website, Instagram, Discord, mailing list)
introduced new communication channel: Society Instagram account

VP Finance, Computer Science Graduate Society

VP Finance for the academic year 2021-2022
architected the society’s website redesign
handled the society’s finances, organized events (list of events here

Co-president, Dalhousie Entrepreneurship Society

introduced series of workshops on entrepreneurship and design thinking concepts, open to students of all faculty, with the support of the NNCE/Faculty of Management

Stanford University Innovation Fellow for Dalhousie

passed through rigorous 2-month online training, then 4-day conference in Silicon Valley (Stanford Campus and Google headquarters) to meet other Fellows from around the world
funded by the Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship

SHAD Fellow

Volunteering

Co-founder and Program Coordinator, Hoist Halifax
Guest Speaker, Refresh Annapolis Valley
Youth Entrepreneurship Speaker, YES Atlantic Conference

Awards and Scholarships

IVADO M.Sc. Excellence Scholarship ($40K value) - funding for second year onwards of M.Sc.
NSERC CGS-M grant ($17.5K value) - funding for first year of M.Sc.
McGill Lorne Trottier Graduate Fellowship ($5K value) - funding for first year of M.Sc.
MITACS Globalink Grant for second co-op term at Dalhousie ($6K value)
Dalhousie Schulich Scholarship ($41.9K value)
Dalhousie Bruce and Dorothy Rossetti Scholarship Silver Award for a Second-Year student, for having the second-best GPA of my year ($1750 value)

Languages

English (native)
Greek (native and C2 level of CEFR)
French (B2 level of CEFR)

Academic Publications

A. Milios, S. Reddy, D. Bahdanau, “In-Context Learning for Text Classification with Many Labels”, Accepted to GenBench workshop at EMNLP 2023 (peer-reviewed, archival). arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10954
A. Milios and P. BehnamGhader, “An Analysis of Social Biases Present in BERT Variants Across Multiple Languages”, Accepted to 2022 Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning (TSRML 2022) Workshop at NeurIPS 2022 (peer-reviewed, non-archival). arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14402
S. Matwin, A. Milios, P. Pralat, A. Soares, and F. Theberge, “Survey of Generative Methods for Social Media Analysis”, arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07041
K. Bereta, A. Milios, K. Chatzikokolakis, and D. Zissis, “Monitoring Marine Protected Areas using Data Fusion and AI Techniques,” NATO CMRE Maritime Situational Awareness Workshop, La Spezia, Italy, 8-10 October 2019. Link [Peer-Reviewed]
A. Milios, K. Bereta, K. Chatzikokolakis, D. Zissis and S. Matwin, “Automatic Fusion of Satellite Imagery and AIS data for Vessel Detection,” 2019 22th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, ON, Canada, 2-5 July 2019. Link [Peer-Reviewed]

Workshop Presentations

A. Milios, D. Zissis, K. Chatzikokolakis, and S. Matwin, “Sail ho! A deep learning approach for ship detection which utilises complimentary sensing capabilities, “ 2018 Canadian Tracking and Fusion group (CTFG) Workshop, Ottawa, ON, Canada, 15-16 October 2018.

Reviewer for

ACL Rolling Review
EACL 2023
ICDAR 2023
EMNLP 2022
AKBC 2022
CIKM 2022