A Berkeley-educated California native, Toby Dylan Hocking received his PhD in mathematics (machine learning) from Ecole Normale Superiere de Cachan (Paris, France) in 2012. He worked as a postdoc in Masashi Sugiyama’s machine learning lab at Tokyo Tech in 2013, and in Guillaume Bourque’s genomics lab in McGill University, Montreal, Canada (2014-2018).

In 2018-2024 he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Northern Arizona University, and since 2024 he is a tenured Associate Professor at Université de Sherbrooke, where he directs the LASSO research lab (Learning Algorithms, Statistical Software, Optimization). Since 2024, Toby is also an Associate Academic member at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

He has authored dozens of R packages, and has published 40+ peer-reviewed research papers on machine learning and statistical software. He has mentored 30+ students in research projects, as well as another 30+ open-source software contributors with R Project in Google Summer of Code.

French translation by MILA.