Ilona Urbaniak

Biography

Research Lead, Centre for Applied AI

Ilona Urbaniak, PhD is the Research Lead at Sheridan’s Centre for Applied AI, where she leads and contributes to industry-driven applied research projects focused on the development and deployment of artificial intelligence solutions. Her work spans computer vision, medical image analysis, machine learning, deep learning, generative and agentic AI, and intelligent decision-support systems.

Dr. Urbaniak brings to Sheridan extensive experience in academia, public-sector research leadership, and industry. Her academic experience includes a role as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cracow University of Technology, encompassing research, teaching, and research supervision in data science, artificial intelligence, statistics, and image processing. She also held a senior leadership role at National Research Institute (NASK), Poland, where she led work in artificial intelligence and big data.

Her industry experience includes serving as a Senior AI Engineer at illumiSonics Inc. (Waterloo, Ontario), where she worked on AI-assisted medical imaging technologies and contributed to patented technology in computational pathology.

A significant part of Dr. Urbaniak’s research has focused on image quality and medical imaging, including objective and perceptual image quality assessment, diagnostic fidelity, lossy image compression, image restoration, and the impact of image degradation on both human interpretation and AI-based analysis. Her broader research interests include computer vision, explainable AI, image representation learning, and AI-assisted decision-support systems.

Dr. Urbaniak has authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications and contributed to patented AI technology in medical imaging. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, an MSc in Mathematics from McMaster University, and a BSc in Applied Computer Science from Toronto Metropolitan University.