Last fall and winter, SPADA PhD students Kyle Gilman and Zhe Du graduated. Kyle’s thesis was titled “Scalable Algorithms Using Optimization on Orthogonal Matrix Manifolds,” and he continues to make fundamental contributions to interesting modern optimization problems. He is currently an Applied AI/ML Senior Associate at JPMorgan Chase. Zhe’s thesis was titled “Learning, Control, and Reduction for Markov Jump Systems,” with lots of interesting work at the intersection of machine learning and control. He is currently a Postdoctoral researcher working with Samet Oymak and Fabio Pasqualetti. I am excited to follow their work into the future as they make an impact in optimization, machine learning, and control!

I’m excited that our results for the K-Subspaces algorithm were accepted to ICML. My postdoc Peng Wang will be presenting his excellent work; you may read the paper here or attend his session if you are interested. K-Subspaces (KSS) is a natural generalization of K-Means to higher dimensional centers, originally proposed by Bradley and Mangasarian in 2000. Peng not only showed that KSS converges locally, but that a simple spectral initialization guarantees a close-enough initialization in the case of data drawn randomly from arbitrary subspaces. This makes a giant step in a line of questioning that has been open for more than 20 years. Great work Peng!

Last fall, my PhD student Amanda Bower defended her thesis titled “Dealing with Intransitivity, Non-Convexity, and Algorithmic Bias in Preference Learning.” Amanda was in the Applied Interdisciplinary Math program, co-advised by Martin Strauss. She will now be moving on to work with Twitter’s ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) group. We are so proud that she is going to go make her mark on the world. Congratulations Dr. Bower!

I am excited that Amanda Bower will have the opportunity to discuss our new work in preference learning, “Preference Modeling with Context-Dependent Salient Features“, at ICML next week. In this work, we propose a new model for preference learning that takes into account the fact that when making pairwise comparisons, certain features may play an outside role in the comparison, making the pairwise comparison result inconsistent with a general preference order. We look forward to hearing people’s questions and feedback! Update post-conference: Her presentation can be viewed here.

SPADA lab is so proud of Dr. Dejiao Zhang and Dr. David Hong. They both successfully defended their PhD dissertations this spring. Dejiao is going to Amazon Web Services next, and David is going to a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. We expect you both to go off and do great things! Congratulations!

I am honored to have received the NSF CAREER award for a proposal on optimization methods and theory for the joint formulation of dimension reduction and clustering. You can read about the award here in the UM press release and also here on the NSF website. Dimension reduction and clustering are arguably the two most critical problems in unsupervised machine learning; they are used universally for data exploration and understanding. Often dimension reduction is used before clustering (or vice versa) to lend tractability to the modeling algorithm. It’s more typical in real data to see clusters each with their own low-dimensional structure, and so a joint formulation is of great interest. I look forward to working toward this end in the next stage of my career.

I am very excited that my project “Mathematics for Learning Nonlinear Generalizations of Subspace Models in High Dimensions” has won the Army Young Investigator award! Subspace models are widely used due to simplicity and ease of analysis. However, while these linear models are very powerful in many high-dimensional data contexts, they also often miss out on important nonlinearities in real data. This project aims to extend recent advances in signal processing to the single-index model and the nonlinear variety model. Read the department’s announcement here.