Mike Gelbart

Co-Founder and Principal @

VISST

Biography

About me: I was born and raised in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As an undergraduate student at Princeton University, I studied physics and worked on research projects in biophysics. In graduate school I switched fields to computer science and received my PhD from the machine learning group at Harvard University. After graduate school I joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia as a teaching professor, where I received tenure in 2021. During my time at UBC I co-created the Master of Data Science Program, where I taught courses and served as Co-Director from 2018 to 2021. I am currently Principal of the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology (VISST), a STEM high school that I co-founded in 2022.

For a non-exhaustive list of things that didn’t work out along the way, see my CV of Failures.

Projects

Professional Projects

I blog at the VISST blog and previously the UBC MDS blog and elsewhere.
I co-created the Key Capabilities in Data Science continuing education program at UBC. The interactive lessons associated with these courses are publicly available: see Programming in Python for Data Science and Introduction to Machine Learning.
I created the UBC course CPSC 330: Applied Machine Learning.
UBC courses with recorded lectures available:
- CPSC 330: Applied Machine Learning (2020)
- CPSC 340: Machine Learning and Data Mining (2018)
- DSCI 572: Supervised Learning II (2020)
- DSCI 512: Algorithms and Data Structures (2019)
- DSCI 511: Programming for Data Science (2019)
I was one of the developers of Spearmint, a package for optimizing expensive functions using Bayesian optimization.
I wrote Embryo Development Geometry Explorer (EDGE), an image processing software package for developmental biology.

Personal Projects

Joel Fox and I created two puzzle games: Line of Sight and Herding Hero. My favourite puzzle games are The Witness and Portal 2 (especially the co-op mode).
I participated in a Chinese speech competition as part of Princeton in Beijing in 2009.

Teaching

UBC undergraduate courses:

CPSC 330: Applied Machine Learning (Spring 2020, Fall 2020)
CPSC 340: Machine Learning and Data Mining (Spring 2017, Summer 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2021)
CPSC 303: Numerical Approximation and Discretization (Spring 2016)
Science One Computer Science (Fall 2015, Spring 2016)
APSC 160: Introduction to Computation in Engineering Design (Fall 2015)

UBC Master of Data Science courses (4 weeks each):

DSCI 512: Algorithms and Data Structures (Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021)
DSCI 572: Supervised Learning II (Spring 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
DSCI 571: Supervised Learning I (Fall 2018)
DSCI 551: Descriptive Statistics and Probability for Data Science (Fall 2018, Fall 2021)
DSCI 563: Unsupervised Learning (Spring 2018)
DSCI 511: Programming for Data Science (Fall 2016, 2019)
DSCI 521: Computing Platforms for Data Science (Fall 2016)