Nico Schiavone

I am an M.Sc. student at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science, advised by Sheila McIlraith. I am currently working on problems in reinforcement learning, explainable algorithms, and machine learning.

I graduated with a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics with a Minor in Mathematics from the University of Alberta in Spring 2024. I worked with Xingyu Li on medical computer vision.

During my B.Sc., I worked as a software engineer at TELUS and a researcher at TRIUMF, along with various other research positions in engineering, physics, mathematical physics, and computer science.

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Research

Reinforcement Learning with Generative Models for Compact Support Sets

In this work, we propose a framework utilizing reinforcement learning as a control for foundation models, allowing for the granular generation of small, focused synthetic support sets to augment the performance of neural network models on real data classification tasks.

MyriadAL: Active Few Shot Learning for Histopathology

Oral Presentation (Top ~15%). In this study, we address this issue in the scenario where the annotation budget is very limited, yet a large amount of unlabelled data for the target task is available. We frame this work in the context of histopathology where labelling is prohibitively expensive.

Other Projects

UNIQLO Web Scraper

A web scraping project using Scrapy and Playwright, developing into a command-line tool for easy shopping on ecommerce sites.

HUGINN

Autonomous retrieval drone made for a capstone project. Utilizes ROS and YOLOV8 to autonomously find the object of choice, and magnetic grippers to pick it up.

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website