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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

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Fletcher Lu
PhD

Associate Professor

Information Technology

Faculty of Business and Information Technology

Contact information

Business and Information Technology Building - Room 3062
North Oshawa
2000 Simcoe Street North
Oshawa, ON L1G 0C5

905.721.8668 ext. 3761

fletcher.lu@ontariotechu.ca
http://faculty.uoit.ca/fletcherlu

Research topics

  • mobile fitness
  • cybercrime
  • insurance fraud
  • reinforcement learning
  • data analytics

Background

Dr. Fletcher Lu is an Associate Professor with Ontario Tech University. He received a Master of Mathematics in Scientific Computation from the University of Waterloo for his thesis research titled On the Use of Augmented Matrices to Solve General Sparse Systems, under the supervision of Alan George, PhD. He earned a PhD in Artificial Intelligence specializing in Machine Learning at the University of Waterloo, with his thesis titled Exploring Model-Based Methods of Reinforcement Learning under the supervision of Dale Schuurmans, PhD. He conducted his postdoctoral research in the area of insurance fraud with the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning University of Waterloo
  • Master of Math, Scientific Computation University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario
  • Bachelor of Math, Computer Science University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario

Research and expertise

Dr. Lu's research areas focus on applying machine learning and numerical analysis techniques towards business and health applications. His research crosses several disciplines, including health informatics, computer science, gaming, fraud detection and security. He has collaborated with industry and government partners, including the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, Manulife Financial, the Canadian Department of National Defence and Medavie Blue Cross.

His current major research projects involve:

  • Adaptively learning fraud patterns in health insurance data.
  • Improving youth fitness with mobile technology applications.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Ontario Partnership for Innovation and Commercialization and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. He was awarded first place at the Canadian Operations Research Society (CORS) 2014 Practice Prize and third place at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) 2013 interactive poster sessions for his fraud auditing work with Markov decision processes. Because of his expertise in technology and business, he has been featured on Canadian national television news (CTV News).

Involvement

  • Selected publications
    • Lu, F., Lemonde, M., A Comparison of Online versus Face-to-Face Teaching Delivery in Statistics Instruction for Undergraduate Health Science Students. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 2013, DOI: 10.1007/s10459-012-9435-3.
    • Lu, F., Turner, K., Murphy, B., Reducing Adolescent Obesity with a Mobile Fitness Application: Study Results of Youth Age 15 to 17.  Proceedings of 15th International Conference on E-Health, Networking, Application & Service: IEEE Healthcom, 2013. 6.           
    • Lu, F., Boritz, J. E. and Covvey, H. D. Adaptive Fraud Detection Using Benford’s Law. Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 19th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, Canadian AI 2006. 19:347-358, 2006.
    • Lu, F., Error Bounds for Policy Evaluation in Reinforcement Learning. Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 18th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, Canadian AI 2005. 18:438-449, 2005.