
Dr. Davood Wadi
Dr. Davood Wadi has PhD in Marketing – Specialization in Artificial Intelligence from HEC Montréal.
Expertise and Experience
Before joining UCW, Dr. Wadi was a lecturer at HEC Montréal teaching Machine Learning I: Large-Scale Data Analysis and Decision Making. He is also an instructor at Great Learning where he teaches the MIT Applied Data Science Program, the Deep Learning for Computer Vision Course and the Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing Course.
Publications and Scholarly Activity
Research Topics
- Behavioral Analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Non-convex Optimization
- Altruism, Prosocial Behavior, and Financial Incentives
Research in Marketing
- The Interplay of Altruism and Financial Incentives: Maximizing Online Reviews through Effective Messaging
- Be careful what you pay for: The effect of performance contingent incentives on online product reviews
Research in Consumer Behavior
- Prosocial LLM Chatbots: How Pure Altruism Reinforcement Enhances Chatbot Trust (2024)
Research in AI/ML
- Read the signs: Towards Invariance to Gradient Descent's Hyperparameter Values (arxiv)
- LabSynth: Label Synthesis Algorithm for AI Domains with Limited Labelled Data
- Text Block Segmentation Competition ICPR2020 (2nd place overall; 2022)
- I2D: Alternative Representation of Eye-Tracking Stream Data as 2D Images
- AOIgen: Automatic Website Area of Interest Detection
- Cognition-Based Auto-Adaptive Website User Interface in Real Time
- Winner of 2020 IVADO PhD Excellence Scholarship
Awards
- Best Ph.D. Thesis Award Finalist (2023)
- IVADO Scientist in Residence Scholarship
- IVADO PhD Excellence Scholarship (2020)
- Saskatchewan Innovation & Opportunity Scholarship (2019)
Service
- Reviewer - 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2025)
- Reviewer - NeurIPS 2024 (Gradient Descent Optimization, LLM, Vector Symbolic Architecture)
- Reviewer - NeurIPS 2022 (Gradient Descent Optimization)