The Speakers
Surya Ganguli
Surya Ganguli triple majored in physics, mathematics, and EECS at MIT, completed a PhD in string theory at Berkeley, and a postdoc in theoretical neuroscience at UCSF. He is now an associate professor of Applied physics at Stanford where he leads the Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab and is a Research Scientist at Meta AI. His research spans the fields of neuroscience, machine learning and physics, focusing on understanding and improving how both biological and artificial neural networks learn striking emergent computations. He has been awarded a Swartz-Fellowship in computational neuroscience, a Burroughs-Wellcome Career Award, a Terman Award, a NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award, a Sloan fellowship, a James S. McDonnell Foundation scholar award in human cognition, a McKnight Scholar award in Neuroscience, a Simons Investigator Award in the mathematical modeling of living systems, and an NSF career award.
Beidi Chen
Beidi Chen is a Postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, working with Dr. Christopher RĂ©. Her research focuses on large-scale machine learning and deep learning. Specifically, she designs and optimizes randomized algorithms (algorithm-hardware co-design) to accelerate large machine learning systems for real-world problems. Prior to joining Stanford, she received her Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University, advised by Dr. Anshumali Shrivastava. She received a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2015. She has held internships in Microsoft Research, NVIDIA Research, and Amazon AI. Her work has won Best Paper awards at LISA and IISA. She was selected as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT and UIUC.
Yanqi Zhou
Yanqi Zhou is currently a senior research scientist at Google Brain, Mountain View, working with James Laudon. She pursued her Ph.D. degree at Princeton University. Her research interest lies in computer systems and machine learning. More specifically, Yanqi works on ML and deep RL methods for computer systems and builds large-scale deep learning models for speech and language tasks.
Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Dimitris Papailiopoulos is the Jay & Cynthia Ihlenfeld Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a faculty fellow of the Grainger Institute for Engineering, and a faculty affiliate at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. His research interests span machine learning, information theory, and distributed systems, with a current focus on efficient large-scale training algorithms and coding-theoretic techniques for robust machine learning. Between 2014 and 2016, Dimitris was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and a member of the AMPLab. He earned his Ph.D. in ECE from UT Austin in 2014, under the supervision of Alex Dimakis. In 2007 he received his ECE Diploma and in 2009 his M.Sc. degree from the Technical University of Crete, in Greece. Dimitris is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2019), two Sony Faculty Innovation Awards (2019 and 2020), a joint IEEE ComSoc/ITSoc Best Paper Award (2020), an IEEE Signal Processing Society, Young Author Best Paper Award (2015), the Vilas Associate Award (2021), the Emil Steiger Distinguished Teaching Award (2021), and the Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019). In 2018, he co-founded MLSys, a new conference that targets research at the intersection of machine learning and systems. In 2018 and 2020 he was program co-chair for MLSys, and in 2019 he co-chaired the 3rd Midwest Machine Learning Symposium.