I am a faculty member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego, also affliated with the CSE department. Prior to joining UCSD, I was with the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2018-2023, where I started the S2ML lab and co-founded the Center for Responsible Machine Learning . Even before that I was a scientist at Amazon AI in Palo Alto from 2017-2018 after obtaining my PhD from the Machine Learning department at CMU.

So what do we do in S2ML lab? Broadly speaking, my students and I apply math and computing to (1) design faster, stronger and more efficient ML algorithms with provable guarantees (2) solve societal challenges (e.g., data privacy, abuse prevention) that emerge in the AI era. Our recent focus include watermarking generative AI, making differential privacy practical, bridging offline and online RL, developing a theory of adaptivity in deep learning. On the application front, I am particularly interested in healthcare and financial markets.