I am a final year Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. I have been fortunate to be mentored by Dr. Quanquan Gu.

My research is centered around Machine Learning, which spans the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, Reinforcement Learning, Data Mining and High Dimensional Statistics.

My ultimate research goal is to develop computationally- and data-efficient machine learning algorithms with both strong empirical performance and theoretical guarantees. See my Curriculum Vitae (updated January 2021).

I will graduate in the summer of 2021. I am currently on the academic job market.

• [2021/01] I am selected to the inaugural cohort of Rising Stars in Data Science by the Center for Data and Computing at the University of Chicago!
• [2020/09] I am selected as a top reviewer for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2020.
• [2020/05] Our forecast on Combating COVID-19 has been adopted in the COVID-19 Forecasts by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), California COVID Assessment Tool (CalCat) by California Department of Public Health (CDPH), and the COVID-19 Forecast Hub by the Reich Lab of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• [2020/03] We launched the project Combating COVID-19 to model and predict the spread of coronavirus using machine learning empowered epidemic models. Details can be found at covid19.uclaml.org
• [2020/02] One paper (P1) on rank aggregation is selected as Oral Presentation in AAAI 2020!
• [2019/09] I am selected as a top reviewer for the Conference on Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019.
• [2019/06] One paper (P1) on reinforcement learning is selected as Oral Presentation in UAI 2019!
• [2019/05] I gave a tutorial on "Nonconvex Optimization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining" with Quanquan Gu and Zhaoran Wang in SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'19). Slides can be found at [Slides]
• [2018/09] Two papers (P1, P2) on nonconvex optimization are selected as Spotlight in NeurIPS 2018!
• [2018/05] One paper (P1) on high-dimensional statistics is selected as Long Oral Talk in ICML 2018!
• [2016/06] I received the Presidential Fellowship in Data Science from the University of Virginia.