The Thesis Review

Tianqi Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University and the Chief Technologist of OctoML. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and systems. Tianqi's PhD thesis is titled "Scalable and Intelligent Learning Systems," which he completed in 2019 at the University of Washington. We discuss his influential work on machine learning systems, starting with the development of XGBoost,an optimized distributed gradient boosting library that has had an enormous impact in the field. We also cover his contributions to deep learning frameworks like MXNet and machine learning compilation with TVM, and connect these to modern generative AI. - Episode notes: www.wellecks.com/thesisreview/episode48.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Follow Tianqi Chen on Twitter (@tqchenml) - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Niloofar Mireshghallah is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on privacy, natural language processing, and the societal implications of machine learning. Niloofar completed her PhD in 2023 at UC San Diego, where she was advised by Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. Her PhD thesis is titled "Auditing and Mitigating Safety Risks in Large Language Models." We discuss her journey into research and her work on privacy and LLMs, including how privacy is defined, common attacks and mitigations, differential privacy, and the balance between memorization and generalization. - Episode notes: www.wellecks.com/thesisreview/episode47.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Yulia Tsvetkov is a Professor in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on multilingual NLP, NLP for social good, and language generation. Yulia's PhD thesis is titled "Linguistic Knowledge in Data-Driven Natural Language Processing", which she completed in 2016 at CMU. We discuss getting started in research, then move to Yulia's work in the thesis that combines ideas from linguistics and natural language processing. We discuss low-resource and multilingual NLP, large language models, and great advice about research and beyond. - Episode notes: www.wellecks.com/thesisreview/episode46.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at www.wellecks.com/thesisreview - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Luke Zettlemoyer is a Professor at the University of Washington and Research Scientist at Meta. His work spans machine learning and NLP, including foundational work in large-scale self-supervised pretraining of language models. Luke's PhD thesis is titled "Learning to Map Sentences to Logical Form", which he completed in 2009 at MIT. We talk about his PhD work, the path to the foundational Elmo paper, and various topics related to large language models. - Episode notes: www.wellecks.com/thesisreview/episode45.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at www.wellecks.com/thesisreview - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Hady Elsahar is a Research Scientist at Naver Labs Europe. His research focuses on Neural Language Generation under constrained and controlled conditions. Hady's PhD was on interactions between Natural Language and Structured Knowledge bases for Data2Text Generation and Relation Extraction & Discovery, which he completed in 2019 at the Université de Lyon. We talk about his phd work and how it led to interests in multilingual and low-resource in NLP, as well as controlled generation. We dive deeper in controlling language models, including his interesting work on distributional control and energy-based models. - Episode notes: www.wellecks.com/thesisreview/episode44.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at www.wellecks.com/thesisreview - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Swarat Chaudhuri is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas. His lab studies problems at the interface of programming languages, logic and formal methods, and machine learning. Swarat's PhD thesis is titled "Logics and Algorithms for Software Model Checking", which he completed in 2007 at the University of Pennsylvania. We discuss reasoning about programs, formal methods & safer machine learning systems, and the future of program synthesis & neurosymbolic programming. - Episode notes: www.wellecks.com/thesisreview/episode43.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at www.wellecks.com/thesisreview - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Charles Sutton is a Research Scientist at Google Brain and an Associate Professor at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on deep learning for generating code and helping people write better programs. Charles' PhD thesis is titled "Efficient Training Methods for Conditional Random Fields", which he completed in 2008 at UMass Amherst. We start with his work in the thesis on structured models for text, and compare/contrast with today's large language models. From there, we discuss machine learning for code & the future of language models in program synthesis. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode42.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Talia Ringer is an Assistant Professor with the Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering group at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on formal verification and proof engineering technologies. Talia's PhD thesis is titled "Proof Repair", which she completed in 2021 at the University of Washington. We discuss software verification and her PhD work on proof repair for maintaining verified systems, and discuss the intersection of machine learning with her work. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode41.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Lisa Lee is a Research Scientist at Google Brain. Her research focuses on building AI agents that can learn and adapt like humans and animals do. Lisa's PhD thesis is titled "Learning Embodied Agents with Scalably-Supervised Reinforcement Learning", which she completed in 2021 at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her work in the thesis on reinforcement learning, including exploration, learning with weak supervision, and embodied agents, and cover various topics related to trends in reinforcement learning. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode40.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Burr Settles leads the research group at Duolingo, a language-learning website and mobile app whose mission is to make language education free and accessible to everyone. Burr’s PhD thesis is titled "Curious Machines: Active Learning with Structured Instances", which he completed in 2008 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We talk about his work in the thesis on active learning, then chart the path to Burr’s role at DuoLingo. We discuss machine learning for education and language learning, including content, assessment, and the exciting possibilities opened by recent advancements. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode39.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Andrew Lampinen is a research scientist at DeepMind. His research focuses on cognitive flexibility and generalization. Andrew’s PhD thesis is titled "A Computational Framework for Learning and Transforming Task Representations", which he completed in 2020 at Stanford University. We talk about cognitive flexibility in brains and machines, centered around his work in the thesis on meta-mapping. We cover a lot of interesting ground, including complementary learning systems and memory, compositionality and systematicity, and the role of symbols in machine learning. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode38.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Joonkoo Park is an Associate Professor and Honors Faculty in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UMass Amherst. He leads the Cognitive and Developmental Neuroscience Lab, focusing on understanding the developmental mechanisms and neurocognitive underpinnings of our knowledge about number and mathematics. Joonkoo’s PhD thesis is titled "Experiential Effects on the Neural Substrates of Visual Word and Number Processing", which he completed in 2011 at the University of Michigan. We talk about numerical processing in the brain, starting with nature vs. nurture, including the learned versus built-in aspects of neural architectures. We talk about the difference between word and number processing, types of numerical thinking, and symbolic vs. non-symbolic numerical processing. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode37.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Dieuwke Hupkes is a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research and the scientific manager of the Amsterdam unit of ELLIS. Dieuwke's PhD thesis is titled, "Hierarchy and Interpretability in Neural Models of Language Processing", which she completed in 2020 at the University of Amsterdam. We discuss her work on which aspects of hierarchical compositionality and syntactic structure can be learned by recurrent neural networks, how these models can serve as explanatory models of human language processing, what compositionality actually means, and a lot more. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode36.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Armando Solar-Lezama is a Professor at MIT, and the Associate Director & COO of CSAIL. He leads the Computer Assisted Programming Group, focused on program synthesis. Armando’s PhD thesis is titled, "Program Synthesis by Sketching", which he completed in 2008 at UC Berkeley. We talk about program synthesis & his work on Sketch, how machine learning's role in program synthesis has evolved over time, and more. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode35.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Sasha Rush is an Associate Professor at Cornell Tech and researcher at Hugging Face. His research focuses on building NLP systems that are safe, fast, and controllable. Sasha's PhD thesis is titled, "Lagrangian Relaxation for Natural Language Decoding", which he completed in 2014 at MIT. We talk about his work in the thesis on decoding in NLP, how it connects with today, and many interesting topics along the way such as the role of engineering in machine learning, breadth vs. depth, and more. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode34.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Michael R. Douglas is a theoretical physicist and Professor at Stony Brook University, and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. His research focuses on string theory, theoretical physics and its relations to mathematics. Michael's PhD thesis is titled, "G/H Conformal Field Theory", which he completed in 1988 at Caltech. We talk about working with Feynman, Sussman, and Hopfield during his PhD days, the superstring revolutions and string theory, and machine learning's role in the future of science and mathematics. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode33.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Andre Martins is an Associate Professor at IST and VP of AI Research at Unbabel in Lisbon, Portugal. His research focuses on natural language processing and machine learning. Andre’s PhD thesis is titled, "The Geometry of Constrained Structured Prediction: Applications to Inference and Learning of Natural Language Syntax", which he completed in 2012 at Carnegie Mellon University and IST. We talk about his work in the thesis on structured prediction in NLP, and discuss connections between his thesis work on later work on sparsity, sparse communication, and more. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode32.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Jay McClelland is a Professor in the Psychology Department and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at Stanford. His research addresses a broad range of topics in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, including Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). Jay's PhD thesis is titled "Preliminary Letter Identification in the Perception of Words and Nonwords", which he completed in 1975 at University of Pennsylvania. We discuss his work in the thesis on the word superiority effect, how it led to the Integrated Activation model, the path to Parallel Distributed Processing and the connectionist revolution, and distributed vs rule-based and symbolic approaches to modeling human cognition and artificial intelligence. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode31.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Dustin Tran is a research scientist at Google Brain. His research focuses on advancing science and intelligence, including areas involving probability, programs, and neural networks. Dustin’s PhD thesis is titled "Probabilistic Programming for Deep Learning", which he completed in 2020 at Columbia University. We discuss the intersection of probabilistic modeling and deep learning, including the Edward library and the novel inference algorithms and models that he developed in the thesis. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode30.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview

Tengyu Ma is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. His research focuses on deep learning and its theory, as well as various topics in machine learning. Tengyu's PhD thesis is titled "Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning: Design, Analysis, and Understanding", which he completed in 2017 at Princeton University. We discuss theory in machine learning and deep learning, including the 'all local minima are global minima' property, overparameterization, as well as perspectives that theory takes on understanding deep learning. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode29.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview