Dr. Popowich conducts his research through the Natural Language Laboratory at Simon Fraser University, where he supervises both MSc and PhD students in Computing Science.

His research is concerned with how computers can be used to process human language, either to make it easier for human beings to interact with computers, or to make it easier for human beings to interact with each other. As such, he has been concerned with how knowledge about language and the world can be represented, maintained, and even learned by computers. Typical real world applications of this research include “smart homes”, the automatic translation of language, tools to assist people in learning language,  and technology to help people search and manage the information contained on computer systems and networks. 

Prospective Graduate Students

If you are interested in graduate studies under the supervision of Dr. Popowich, application information is available here with additional information here. The natural language lab will indeed be accepting new graduate students in 2021, and you are encouraged to apply so that the admissions committee can review your full application. You can include Dr. Popowich’s name as a potential supervisor in the on-line application system, but please do not send CVs or transcripts to him via e-mail.

Recent publications

1. •P. Winne, J. Nesbit and F. Popowich. nStudy: A System for Researching Information Problem Solving. Technology, Knowledge and Learning (2017).
   

2. •M. Oveisi,  J.P. Delgrande, F. J. Pelletier and F. Popowich (2017) "Kernel Contraction and Base Dependence",  JAIR, Volume 60, pages 97-148
   

3. •F. Popowich (2018a). Don’t fret about AI, focus on humans. Vancouver Sun, 1 Mar 2018.
   

4. •F. Popowich (2018b). The importance of the ‘human factor’ in relation to Smart City data. Business in Vancouver, October 1, 2018.
   

5. •A. Ambartsoumian, F. Popowich. Self-Attention: A Better Building Block for Sentiment Analysis Neural Network Classifiers. WASSA@EMNLP 2018: 130-139
   

6. •L. Sawatzky, S. Bergner, F. Popowich. Visualizing RNN States with Predictive Semantic Encodings. IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). IEEE, 2019.
   

7. •F. Naz and F. Popowich (2019). Mining Retail Telecommunication Data to Predict Profitability, 2019 IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing (PACRIM), Victoria, BC, Canada, 2019, pp. 1-5.
   

8. •L. Odilinye, F. Popowich (2020). Personalized Recommender System using Learners' Metacognitive Reading Activities. To appear in the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference in Methodologies and intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (MIS4TEL 2020).