Biography

Mahdi Soltanolkotabi is the Director of the Center on AI Foundations for the Sciences (AIF4S) at the University of Southern California. He is also an associate professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Industrial and Systems Engineering where he holds an Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. Prior to joining USC, he completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford in 2014. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the EECS department at UC Berkeley during the 2014-2015 academic year. Mahdi is the recipient of the Information Theory Society Best Paper Award, Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Career award, an Airforce Office of Research Young Investigator award (AFOSR-YIP) and the Viterbi School of Engineering junior faculty research award. His research focuses on developing the mathematical foundations of modern data science via characterizing the behavior and pitfalls of contemporary nonconvex learning and optimization algorithms with applications in deep learning, large scale distributed training, federated learning, computational imaging, and AI for scientific and healthcare applications.

Research Interests

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