Prospective PhDs/postdocs/undergrads/masters who want to work with me: see here
I am an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. My research focuses on Machine Learning and its applications to Healthcare and Biomolecular systems. I am also the co-founder and CTO of a drug screening start-up, GiwoTech Inc.
During my PostDoc in Polina Golland’s lab at MIT, I worked on machine learning algorithms for healthcare applications. I developed generative models for natural images, Chest X-Rays and brain images, which can be used as prior models for image reconstruction tasks, using bayesian posterior optimisation.
During my PhD, I developed Bayesian statistical models for prediction of Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative diseases. Such models were able to not only to estimate the continuous evolution of Alzheimer’s disease, but also discover novel spatial patterns of brain pathology (e.g. DIVE) or transfer such “learned evolutions” in populations with different diseases (e.g. DKT). I further co-organised TADPOLE, an international competition that compared 92 algorithms from 33 teams at predicting the evolution of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, together with UCL colleagues N. Firth and S. Primativo, I performed one of the first comprehensive clinical studies (Firth et al., Brain, 2019) on the evolution of Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare dementia affecting the visual system.
On the technical side, I particularly enjoy the mathematics of statistical inference methods for Machine Learning. For example, I derived the EM-update rules for two complex Bayesian models that I proposed (see Supplementary section of the DIVE article and Appendix sections B and D of my PhD thesis).
I also have a keen interest in general machine learning and computational intelligence, in order to make computers perform intelligent tasks. Aside from research, at MIT I was also the president of the Postdoctoral Association, working with the MIT administration to create a better research environment for postdocs.
You can see a complete list of publications on my Google Scholar page. See my academic job market research statement here.
My partner Leilani Gilpin is also a researcher in ML, and does fantastic work on ML Explainability using logical reasoning methods. See her publications here.
PostDoc in Polina Golland's lab
MIT CSAIL
PhD in Computer Science, 2019
Center for Medical Image Computing, UCL
MEng in Computer Science, 2014
Imperial College London
BSc in Computer Science, 2013
Imperial College London
Project’s we’re currently focusing on: Molecular Dynamics, Differentiable simulators, ML Compositionality and Generative Modelling. For prospective students, look at these in particular.
Simulating a virtual cell using ML-derived coarse-grained potentials
ML Compositionality refers to the idea of building a large ML model from modular and reusable building blocks, just like LEGO.
Using ML and compressed sensing techniques to improve the quality, speed and cost of medical scans.
Develop models for generation, reconstruction and manipulation of images, text or other high-dimensional data.
We build benchmarks and organize community challenges on key medical prediction problems.
Modelling the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative diseases
Building MRI/PET/Diffusion/MD simulators in PyTorch that can enable us to perform backpropagation through the entire simulator
Using AI/ML for scaling Molecular Dynamics simulations of proteins.
Building software and ML models for the visualisation of medical images. An example project is BrainPainter.
Sreevani Suvarna: Software Engineer at ADP
Jueqi Wang: PhD student at BU
Junya Ihira: finished his exchange program at UCSC in 2023, returned to Japan
Bhrigu Garg: graduated in 2023
Lecture Recordings
CSE140 Intro to AI, Winter 2023 (17 lectures):
CSE242 Machine Learning, Fall 2022 (18 lectures):