CV

Contact Information

  • Lab Address: 3380 Blvd Robert-Bourassa, Montreal, QC H2X 2G6
  • Email: antonios.valkanas@mail{dot}mcgill{dot}ca
  • Website: antonvalk.github.io
  • GitHub: github.com/AntonValk
  • Status: PhD Student — McGill University / MILA / ILLS

Education

PhD — Electrical & Computer Engineering | McGill University — MILA — ILLS, Montreal, Canada (Sept 2022 – Present)
Advisor: Prof. Mark Coates

  • Research areas: Bayesian learning, online learning, probabilistic reasoning with large language models.
  • Publications in NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, AAAI, TMLR, IEEE Journals & Conferences.

MSc — Electrical & Computer Engineering | McGill University, Montreal, Canada (Sept 2019 – May 2022)
Advisor: Prof. Mark Coates

  • Thesis: Graph Modelling of Bag Relations in Multiple Instance Learning.
  • Publications in AAAI, IEEE Conferences.

BEng — Electrical Engineering (Honors) | McGill University, Montreal, Canada (Sept 2015 – May 2019)
Honors thesis advisor: Prof. Dennis Giannacopoulos.

Research Experience

Applied Scientist Intern — Amazon (Seattle, WA, USA) (Jun 2024 – Sept 2024 & May 2025 – Aug 2025)
Managers: Dr. Vijay Nirmalananda (2024), Dr. Shervin Malmasi (2025)

  • Developed pricing research models for 100M+ Amazon store items by integrating regression models with M5 CLIP multi-modal text-vision features.
  • Built methods for epistemic uncertainty quantification and third-party item price identification using Multi-SWAG.
  • Delivered code using AWS, EC2, S3, Python, PyTorch, Git, Docker, and Jupyter; model adopted by the team and deployed to production.

Associate Researcher (Intern) — Quantum Technologies (Montreal, Canada) (Feb 2022 – Sept 2023)
Manager: Yingxue Zhang

  • Led literature review, experiment design, and algorithm development for negative item sampling in GNN recommender systems.
  • Improved recall@k by 10-20% on large-scale benchmarks (Netflix, Taobao 14, Yelp, Gowalla) and used incremental learning to reduce training time by 80%.

Research Scientist Intern — Unity Technologies (Labs, Montreal, Canada) (May 2021 – Sept 2021)
Manager: Dr. Boris Oreshkin

  • Tackled high motion-capture costs by building a transformer model for automatic high-quality human motion animation.
  • Integrated the model into Unity Editor with engineering partners; responsibilities included data gathering/cleaning, baselines, algorithm design, and experiments.

Undergraduate Research Assistant — McGill University (2017 – 2019)
Supervisor: Prof. Dennis Giannacopoulos

  • Conducted computational electromagnetics research, performing electric field simulations of conductors, designing experiments, and parallelizing code.

Undergraduate Research Assistant — McGill University (2019)
Supervisor: Prof. Harry Leib

  • Focused on engineering education; designed a low-cost satellite signal reception system for communication teaching labs.
  • Built an antenna with household materials to receive and decode NASA NOAA weather satellite images using SDR.

Selected Awards, Fellowships, and Grant Funding

  • 2024 — PGSD (NSERC) Doctoral Award ($140,000 over 4 years)
  • 2022 — Vadasz Scholar, McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA) ($128,000 over 4 years)
  • 2022 — Niarchos Fellowship for Excellence in Graduate Education ($74,500 over 2 years)
  • 2020 — NSERC CGSM Alexander Graham Bell Award ($17,000)
  • 2012 — Silver Medal, Youth National Math Olympiad (Greece), awarded by the Hellenic Mathematical Society

Invited Talks

  • Winter 2024: Efficient Inference using Large Language Models — Bellairs ML Workshop, Barbados.
  • Winter 2023: Online Learning with Multiple Models — Bellairs ML Workshop, Barbados.
  • Winter 2022: Human Motion Animation with Transformers — Bellairs ML Workshop, Barbados.
  • Winter 2021: Graph-based Multiple Instance Learning — Bellairs Graph Learning Workshop, Barbados.

Service & Outreach

Peer Review: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IEEE Journals, AISTATS, Artificial Intelligence Review (Springer), and TMLR.

Professional Memberships: IEEE (Student Member), ISBA (Student Member).

Volunteer Work: 2018 — Volunteer Math & Science Tutor, Toronto District School Board (500+ hours).