This year’s recipients of the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships are Yihang He and Ruiyu Gou.
Yihang is a combined major in Computer Science and Statistics, entering the third year, excelling in a wide range of courses, and honoured with several academic awards. Through a summer internship with Cloudwalk Tech, Yihang has developed skills involving back-end developing and machine learning. Other involvement, in a research project related to artificial intelligence, involves scraping data on social network server websites.
Ruiyu Gou is a combined major in Computer Science and Statistics, entering fourth year with a stellar academic record. Ruiyu spent the summer of 2021 as a Data Science for Social Good Fellow, through UBC’s Data Science Institute. In the program, she worked with a team using computer vision techniques to analyze mobility and traffic data from public cameras. These data are regularly used to study problems such as business recovery after COVID lockdowns. The team’s data analysis pipeline included the removal of bias due to the inherent preferential sampling of traffic and mobility data. Program leaders noted her intelligence, her ability to solve challenging problems and her great leadership skills.
About the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships
In 2016, John and Barbara Petkau endowed two scholarships to recognize the academic merit of the next generation of statisticians and the impact these statisticians will have on solving world problems. One scholarship is for a student entering third year, and the other is for a student entering fourth year.
John Petkau, a professor emeritus in the Department, has contributed in many ways to the Department and the discipline with his vision and leadership, statistical expertise, generosity of time, and his mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. John’s wife, Barbara, deserves special thanks, for generously sharing John's time with us.
See a list of previous recipients of the scholarships here.