William Laplante

PhD Student @ UCL

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I’m a first-year PhD student at University College London (UCL) and part of the Fundamentals of Statistical Machine Learning group.

I’m supervised by François-Xavier Briol as well as Andrew Duncan and Jeremias Knoblauch. My studies are co-funded by UCL’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Intensive Science, the Department of Statistical Science at UCL, and the Alan Turing Institute’s Program for Fundamental Research in Data Science and AI.

Before starting my PhD, I was part of the Financial Engineering & Modelling team at Deloitte, and worked in the Global Securities Funding division (previously Global Equity Derivatives) at National Bank Financial. I completed a Master’s degree in Statistics at the University of British Columbia and graduated from the Joint Honours in Mathematics and Physics program at McGill University for my undergraduate studies.

News

May 01, 2025 Collaborated with The Guardian through UCL’s Data Intensive Science PhD program to improve their editorial style guide checker with LLMs.
Apr 07, 2025 Presenting a session with discussion at The Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting (BAYSM) 2025.
Mar 07, 2025 Presenting Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes at the Oxford Man Institute of Quantitative Finance.
Jan 31, 2025 Finished writing my first paper, Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes!
Oct 01, 2024 Started my PhD at UCL.

Selected Publications

  1. Preprint
    Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes
    William Laplante, Matias Altamirano, Andrew Duncan, and 2 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02450, 2025