Adjunct Faculty, Computer Science — AI
PhD, Computer Science — AI
Advised by Andrew Ng

Google, Machine Learning Product Manager
Kensho, Product Management Consultant
Tamr, Product Manager

Joint B.A., Computer Science & the Classics
summa cum laude with Highest Honors
Phi Beta Kappa 'Senior 48'

Teaching Fellow, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Non-resident tutor, Eliot House

Generative models are magical: telling stories, making art, writing code. I'm obsessed. I was supposed to drop out of my PhD, but I got so obsessed I found myself failing that goal and graduating. I mean, have you checked out my Twitter? The obsession is real. Thankfully, I also like building product and commercializing things.

Publications on Google Scholar.

I created and taught the GANs courses at Stanford and on Coursera. These are the first courses on GANs, the state-of-the-art in realistic image generation.

Our course launch is recorded on Youtube, so go take a little peek.

I have the great fortune of teaching 80,000 students around the world, who I hope go on to do great things. When first recording, I was teaching 1:1 to my sister. She was my student 0. I hope that's made the experience more personal and engaging to every student in the future.

I've also contributed edits to Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th edition), the most widely read AI textbook in the world, by Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig — specifically the machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning chapters.

I wish more people were willing to say this publicly, especially those I admire in my field. For those who look up to me, I hope you know I stand for this and am willing to say and work towards this publicly. During the protests in summer 2020, I put together a small skunkworks team of great students and we used computer vision for anti-facial recognition to start helping with protester anonymity. We've since connected with several groups and hopefully made a small difference.

On weekends, I used to run Sidepact, a weekend program for employed engineers to start companies — cofounded with my amazing college friend, Kevin Sun. Our current program director is the wonderful Sebastian Gallese, who launched his company last batch.

O reader, my reader. Yes, that I am. Without getting into the poems I've written for Yelp reviews (excuse the praeteritio), here are some of my highlights. (1) A Sonnet Riddle. And (2) I'll just paste this other one here for you. It's a Shakespearean sonnet on training neural networks:

Cross entropy was at a heavy loss,
As poor costly predictions tumbled out,
Bidden keenly by a research Pangloss,
Who builds, tests, tunes without enough doubt.

Back alas to the core architecture,
A broad search was to be conducted.
Better models were bullish conjecture,
As loss was tallied and reconstructed.

One model had promising vigor,
To prophesy the right output vector.
This net was much deeper, faster, bigger,
And deemed best by the model selector.

So its gradient cared not to relent,
As it hurried to take a swift descent.

My undergrad thesis visualized the logic of Latin grammar into puzzle pieces for novices to learn more intuitively and engagingly. Think: Scratch for natural language. Play at TeachMeLatin.com. Watch the video on the research behind it.

Began as a personal research project, published in ACM CHI, one of the top ranked computer science conferences in the world, and my undergraduate thesis. Collaborated with 4 Harvard professors, 2 in Computer Science and 2 in Classics.

I think we often underestimate simple punctuation marks, which contain rich storehouses of meaning and the nuances of which are context-dependent. While the question mark, for example, can indicate a negative feeling such as uncertainty, it is also able to express the positive feeling of possibility and even a neutral and emotionally independent interrogative, such as a database query.