I work on algorithmic statistics and machine learning. My research is part of broader efforts in Foundations of Data Science, Machine Learning, and Theory of Computation at Columbia.
If you are a (current or prospective) student interested in coming to Columbia and/or working with me on research, or if you are generally interested in getting started in machine learning and/or research, please check this page of frequent answers to questions.
My papers can be found by following this link. (See also arXiv, dblp, Google Scholar.)
People
I’m lucky to be able to work with several outstanding students and postdocs.
- Students
- Navid Ardeshir (Ph.D. in progress)
- Noah Bergam (Ph.D. in progress)
- Jagdeep Bhatia (High school diploma, 2020; → MIT)
- Alejandro Buendia (B.S., 2019; → Microsoft/MIT → Stanford)
- Samuel Deng (M.S., 2021; Ph.D. in progress)
- Rishabh Dudeja (Ph.D., 2021; → Harvard → U. of Wisconsin)
- Arushi Gupta (B.S., 2016; M.S., 2018; → Princeton)
- Giannis Karamanolakis (Ph.D., 2022; → Amazon Alexa AI)
- Jingwen Liu (Ph.D. in progress)
- Berkan Ottlik (B.S. in progress)
- Edward Ri (B.S., 2024)
- Clayton Sanford (Ph.D., 2024; → Google Research)
- Eden Shaveet (Bridge-to-Ph.D. program, 2024; → Cornell Tech)
- Kevin Shi (Ph.D., 2020; → Facebook)
- Geelon So (M.S., 2019; → UC San Diego)
- Kiran Vodrahalli (Ph.D., 2022; → Google Brain)
- Ji Xu (Ph.D., 2020; → Two Sigma)
- Mingyue Xu (M.S., 2022; → Purdue)
- Postdocs
- Daniel G. Alabi
- Debmalya Mandal (→ MPI-SWS → U. of Warwick)
- Christopher Tosh (→ Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center)
I’ve also worked with other fantastic students on their thesis research, including: Tom Effland, Mathias Lécuyer, Avner May, Cun Mu, Karl Stratos, José Manuel Zorrilla Matilla.
Service
- Associate editor / action editor
- Senior program committees
- Conference on Learning Theory 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 (co-chair with Alina Beygelzimer), 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
- International Conference on Machine Learning 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2025 (co-chair with Maryam Fazel, Simon Lacoste-Julien, and Virginia Smith)
- Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2012, 2013, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023
- International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics 2016, 2017, 2019
- International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 (co-chair with Claire Vernade)
- Program / workshop / seminar organization
- Program on Modern Paradigms in Generalization @ Simons Institute (Fall 2024)
- Columbia Foundations of Data Science Center Workshop (April 26, 2024)
- Columbia Statistical Machine Learning Symposium (April 7-8, 2023)
- FOCS 2021 Workshop on Machine Learning (February 7-8, 2022)
- Columbia Year of Statistical Machine Learning (Fall 2019-Spring 2020)
- Columbia DSI/TRIPODS Deep Learning Workshop (March 15, 2019)
- Columbia Foundations of Data Science Seminar (Fall 2015)
- ICML 2014 Method of Moments and Spectral Learning (June 25, 2014)
- DIMACS/CCICADA Systems and Analytics of Big Data (March 17-18, 2014)
- NeurIPS 2013 Spectral Learning (December 10, 2013)
- ICML 2013 Spectral Learning (June 21, 2013)
Teaching
- Courses at Columbia
- Tutorials
Thanks
I am grateful for support provided by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Columbia Data Science Institute, Bloomberg, Google, JP Morgan, NVIDIA, Two Sigma, and Yahoo.
- ONR: Multi-group machine learning—theory and algorithms
- NSF IIS: Towards Causal Fair Decision-making
- TRIPODS: From Foundations to Practice of Data Science and Back [website]
- NSF IIS: Adaptive Information Extraction from Social Media [website]
- NSF DMREF: Deblurring our View of Atomic Arrangements in Complex Materials
- Sloan Research Fellowship
- Columbia DSI Data Science Interdisciplinary ROADS Grant
- Bloomberg Data Science Research Grant
- Google Faculty Research Award
- JP Morgan Faculty Award
- Two Sigma Research Gift
- Yahoo Faculty and Research Engagement Program Award