Student Alumni

Lingyu Gao

PhD - 2024
Advisor - Kevin Gimpel
Research Interests: Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics
Employment at time of graduation: AI engineer, Educational Testing Service
Thesis: Harnessing the Intrinsic Knowledge of Pretrained Language Models for Challenging Text Classification Settings (August 2024)
Honors: 2021 ETS Pre-Doctoral Fellowship

Shashank Srivastava

PhD - 2024
Advisor: Madhur Tulsiani
Research Interests: Algorithms and complexity
Employment at time of graduation: Postdoc, jointly at Rutgers and Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
Thesis: Continuous Optimization for Decoding Errors (August 2024)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction

Kevin Stangl

PhD - 2024
Advisor: Avrim Blum
Research Interests: Machine Learning Theory
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist, HiddenLayer
Thesis: Fairness, Accuracy, and Unreliable Data (August 2024)

Ben Lai

PhD - 2024
Advisor: Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Computational biology and bioinformatics, Machine learning and optimization
Employment at time of graduation: AI Fellow, CZ Biohub Chicago
Thesis: Leveraging Deep Generative Model For Computational Protein Design And Optimization (August 2024)

Takuma Yoneda

PhD - 2024
Advisor: Matt Walter
Research Interests: Robotics, Speech and language, Vision and graphics
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist, Google DeepMind
Thesis: Generative Modeling Perspective for Control and Reasoning in Robotics (August 2024)

Davis Yoshida

PhD - 2024
Advisor: Kevin Gimpel
Research Interests: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing
Employment at time of graduation: Machine learning Engineer, Continua AI
Thesis: Making the Most of your Model: Methods for Finetuning and Applying Pretrained Transformers (August 2024)

Han Shao

PhD - 2024
Advisor - Avrim Blum
Research Interests - Machine learning and optimization
Employment at time of graduation - Postdoc at Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (2024); Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Dept of CS (2025)
Thesis: Trustworthy Machine Learning under Social and Adversarial Data Sources (August 2024)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction

Freda Shi

PhD - 2024
Advisors - Karen Livescu and Kevin Gimpel
Research Interests: Speech and Language
Employment at time of graduation: Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and a Faculty Member at the Vector Institute.
Thesis: Learning Language Structures through Grounding (June 2024)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction; 2021 Google PhD Fellowship

Falcon Dai

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Matthew Walter
Research Interests: Reinforcement learning (sequential decision making in an unknown environment)
Employment at time of graduation: Machine Learning Researcher at Symbolica AI
Thesis: On Reward Structures of Markov Decision Processes (August 2023)

Rachit Nimavat

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Julia Chuzhoy
Research Interests: Theoretical Computer Science, mainly approximation algorithms and hardness of approximation
Employment at time of graduation: TBA
Thesis: GraphTheory and Its Uses in Graph Algorithms and Beyond (August 2023)

Shane Settle

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Karen Livescu
Research Interests: Speech and language
Employment at time of graduation: TBA
Thesis: Neural Approaches to Spoken Content Embedding (August 2023)

Bowen Shi

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Karen Livescu
Research Interests: Applications of machine learning to speech recognition and computer vision
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist at Meta AI
Thesis: Toward American Sign Language Processing in the Real World: Data, Tasks, and Methods (August 2023)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction

Qingming Tang

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Karen Livescu
Research Interests: Machine Learning and Speech Recognition
Employment at time of graduation: Senior applied scientist in Alexa Perceptual Technologies (APT) of Alexa AI
Thesis: Speech representation learning: Learning bidirectional encoders with single-view, multi-view, and multi-task methods (July 2023)

Omar Montasser

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Nati Srebro
Research Interests: Machine Learning
Employment at time of graduation: PostDoc- University of California, Berkey
Thesis: Theoretical Foundations of Adversarially Robust Learning (June 2023)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction; 2017 Niyogi Fellowship Recipient

Andrea F Daniele

PhD - 2023
Advisor - Matthew Walter
Research Interests: Robotics and Natural Language Processing
Employment at time of graduation: Duckietown
Thesis: Accessible Interfaces for the Development and Deployment of Robotic Platforms (May 2023)

Mingda Chen

PhD - 2022
Advisor - Kevin Gimpel
Research Interests: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist at Meta AI
Thesis: Leveraging Natural Supervision for Language Representation Learning and Generation (July 2022)

Charles B Schaff

PhD - 2022
Advisors: Matt Walter
Research Interests: Machine learning and its applications
Employment at time of graduation: Autopilot Engineer at Tesla
Thesis: Neural Approaches to Co-Optimization in Robotics (August 2022)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction

Shubham Toshniwal

PhD - 2022 Advisors: Karen Livescu and Kevin Gimpel
Research Interests: Machine learning and its applications to natural language processing
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist, Facebook AI Research (FAIR)
Thesis: Efficient and Interpretable Neural Models for Entity Tracking (August 2022)

Igor Vasiljevic

PhD - 2022
Advisor: Greg Shakhnarovich
Research Interests: Computer Vision
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute
Thesis: Neural Camera Models (August 2022)

Nicholas Kolkin

PhD - 2021
Advisor - Greg Shakhnarovich
Research Interests: Machine learning and Computer Vision
Employment at time of graduation: Research Engineer, Adobe Creative Intelligence Lab
Thesis: Non-Parametric Neural Style Transfer (August 2021)

Ruotian Luo

PhD - 2021
Advisor - Greg Shakhnarovich
Research Interests: Machine learning and Computer Vision
Employment at time of graduation: Software Engineer, Waymo
Thesis: Goal-driven text descriptions for images (August 2021)

Lifu Tu

PhD - 2021
Advisor - Kevin Gimpel
Research Interests: Natural language processing, deep learning and machine learning
Employment at time of graduation: Research Scientist, Salesforce Research
Thesis: Learning Energy-Based Approximate Inference Networks for Structured Applications in NLP (August 2021)

Blake Woodworth

PhD - 2021
Advisor - Nati Srebro
Research Interests: Machine Learning Theory and Optimization
Employment at time of graduation: Postdoc, Inria
Thesis: The Minimax Complexity of Distributed Optimization (September 2021)
Honors: Thesis of Distinction

Takeshi Onishi

PhD - 2020
Advisor - David McAllester
Research Interests: Machine Learning + Natural Language Processing
Employment at time of graduation: Toyota Motor Corporation
Thesis: Relation/Entity-Centric Reading Comprehension (August 2020)

Siqi Sun

PhD - 2020
Advisor - Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Machine learning, mathematical modeling and its application in bioinformatics
Employment at time of graduation: Researcher, Microsoft
Thesis: Unsupervised and Supervised Structure Learning for Contact Prediction (August 2020)

Hai Wang

PhD - 2020
Advisor - David McAllester
Research Interests: Unsupervised/weakly supervised natural language processing, with applications in machine reading, machine translation and biomedical data analysis. He has broad interests in large scale Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Optimization.
After graduating from TTIC, Hai was employed at JD.COM at Mountain View. He is currently an applied scientist at Amazon.
Thesis: Knowledge Efficient Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (August 2020)

Mohammadreza Mostajabi

PhD - 2019
Advisor - Greg Shakhnarovich
Research Interests: Machine Learning + Computer Vision
Employment at time of graduation: Research Engineer at Zendar
Thesis: Learning Rich Representations For Structured Visual Prediction Tasks (September 2019)

Heejin Choi

PhD - 2018
Advisor - Nati Srebro
Research Interests: Machine Learning
Thesis: Efficient Structured Surrogate Loss and Regularization in Structured Prediction (September 2019)

Shubhendu Trivedi

PhD - 2018
Advisor - Greg Shakhnarovich
Research Interests: Machine Learning and Computer Vision
Employment at time of graduation: Institute Fellow at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (Brown University), AND researcher-in-residence for ICERM’s Computer Vision program from Feb-May 2019
Thesis: Discriminative Learning of Similarity and Group Equivariant Representations (August 2018)

Charalampos Angelidakis

PhD - 2018
Advisor - Yury Makarychev
Research Interests: Approximation Algorithms
Employment at time of graduation: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich)
Thesis: Shortest path queries, graph partitioning and covering problems in worst and beyond worst case settings (July 2018)

Payman Yadollahpour

PhD - 2017
Advisor - Greg Shakhnarovich
Research Interests: Machine learning and Computer Vision
Employment at time of graduation: Joint appointment at MIT CSAIL and University of Pittsburgh as a postdoctoral researcher
Thesis: Exploring and Exploiting Diversity for Image Segmentation (February 2017)

Hao Tang

PhD - 2017
Advisor - Karen Livescu
Research Interests: Machine Learning and Automatic Speech Recognition
Employment at time of graduation: MIT
Thesis: Sequence Prediction with Neural Segmental Models (September 2017))

Behnam Neyshabur

PhD - 2017
Advisor - Nati Srebro
Research Interests: Machine Learning
After graduating from TTIC, Behnam was a member of Theoretical Machine Learning program at Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton and a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. Behnam is currently a member of the technical staff at AnthropicAI. Thesis: Implicit Regularization in Deep Learning (August 2017)

Somaye Hashemifar

PhD - 2017
Advisor - Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Bioinformatics
After graduating from TTIC, Somaye was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in New York City. She is currently a Senior AI Scientist at Genetech, in the San Francisco Bay area.
Thesis: Computational prediction and analysis of protein-protein interaction networks (August 2017)

Zhiyong Wang

PhD - 2016
Advisor - Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Employment at time of graduation: Google
Thesis: Knowledge-based machine learning methods for macromolecular 3D structure prediction (December 2016)

Taehwan Kim

PhD - 2016
Advisor - Karen Livescu
Research Interests: Machine Learning and Computer Vision
After graduating from TTIC, Taehwan was a postdoctoral scholar in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences department at the California Institute of Technology. He was an applied scientist at Amazon Alexa AI and a lead research scientist at a start-up company, ObEN. He is now an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence and the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea.
Thesis: American Sign Language fingerspelling recognition from video: Methods for unrestricted recognition and signer-independence (August 2016)

Avleen Bijral

PhD - 2016
Advisor - Nati Srebro
Research Interests: Machine Learning
Employment at time of graduation: Microsoft
Thesis: Data Dependent Convergence for Distributed Stochastic Optimization (August 2016)

Jianzhu Ma

PhD - 2015
Advisor - Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Bioinformatics
After graduating from TTIC, Jianzhu worked for University of California, San Diego (Department of Medicine). In 2020, he will be a tenure track Walther Assistant Professor at Purdue University in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Biochemistry.
Thesis: Protein Structure Prediction by Protein Alignments (September 2015)

Feng Zhao

PhD - 2014
Advisor - Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Bioinformatics
Employment at time of graduation: Validus
Thesis: Structural Learning for Template-free Protein Folding (August 2013)

Andrew Cotter

PhD - 2013
Advisor - Nathan Srebro
Research Interests: Machine Learning
Employment at time of graduation: Google Research Mountain View
Thesis: Stochastic Optimization For Machine Learning (August 2013)

Jian Peng

PhD - 2013
Advisor - Jinbo Xu
Research Interests: Bioinformatics
After graduating from TTIC, Jian was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics and the Computation and Biology Group at CSAIL, MIT. In 2014, he will be a visiting assistant professor with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and as of 2015 he is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at UIUC.
Thesis: Statistical inference for template-based protein structure prediction (June 2013)
Awards: 2020 Overton PRize, 2017 NSF CAREER, 2016 Sloan Research Fellow

Karthik Sridharan

PhD - 2012
Advisor - Nathan Srebro
Research Interests: Theoretical Machine Learning
After graduating from TTIC, Karthik has spent three years as a postdoctoral research scholar at the Department of Statistics, University of Pennsylvania. As of 2014, he is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science department at Cornell.
Thesis: Learning From An Optimization Viewpoint (April 2012)
Awards: 2018 Sloan Research Fellow, 2018 NSF CAREER Award
Honors: Thesis of Distinction

Hoang Trinh

PhD - 2010
Advisor - David McAllester
Research Interests: Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning and Robotics
After graduating from TTIC, Hoang was a postdoctoral fellow at IBM Research T. J. Watson for 2 years, and then a senior research scientist at UtopiaCompression in L.A. As of 2014, he is a data scientist at Misfit Wearables.
Thesis: A Machine Learning Approach to Recovery of Scene Geometry from Images (July 2010)

Wonseok Chae

PhD - 2009
Advisor - Matthias Blume
Research Interests: Programming Languages and Software Engineering
Employment at time of graduation: Starview Technology
Thesis: Type Safe Extensible Programming (October 2009)

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