People

Current Members

Lav R. Varshney

Lav Varshney is the Della Pietra Infinity Professor and inaugural director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He is co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company building novel human-controllable AI for discovery and creativity, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment. He holds appointments at RAND Corporation and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a visiting scholar at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a principal research scientist at Salesforce Research AI, and a research staff member at IBM Research. He is a former White House staffer, having served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national AI and wireless communications policy. His research interests include information and coding theory, statistical signal processing, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and creativity. He received his B.S. degree from Cornell University and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Matthew Babbitt

Matthew Babbitt is a Postdoctoral Associate at the AI Innovation Institute. His mathematical interests intersect with Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, Galois Theory, and Elliptic Curves, while his AI research interests focus on theoretical foundations of Machine Learning as well as applications of LLMs to mathematical creation. His current research program seeks to clarify relationships between various algebras and information lattices for use in Information Lattice Learning. Matthew also writes math contest problems, holding memberships on multiple editorial boards. He is also a founding director on the board of the Upstate New York Math Team nonprofit organization dedicated to coaching high-school students for math contests. Matthew received a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 and a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2025 through the mentorship of Carlos Arreche.

Babak Hemmatian

Babak Hemmatian received a degree in clinical psychology from the University of Tehran in his native Iran before moving to the United States, where he received an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University. Previously, he was a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Associate Director of the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He studies how complex reasoning evolves naturally in networks of agents, be they humans, machines, or a combination of the two. To this end, he combines theories from cognitive science and neuroscience with behavioral experiments on one hand, and advanced computational methods on the other. He has applied this integrative perspective to domains ranging from moral reasoning to general intelligence to argumentation on social media.

Lily Zhang

Lily Zhang is a Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics and Statistics. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard University, where she was named to the Dean’s List, and a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College. She serves on the mathematics faculty at Hofstra University during the academic year and at Brown University during the summer. Her research lies at the intersection of algebraic topology and machine learning, using mathematical tools to uncover higher order structures hidden in complex data. Applications include neuroscience, physics, and robotics. Previously, she worked as an engineer at Siemens and at a biomedical startup.

Razan Baltaji

Razan Baltaji is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests lie at the intersection of science and machine learning as well as multimodal machine learning. She is also passionate about globalization of engineering research and education.

Anay Pattanaik

Anay Pattanaik is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science. He received his B.Tech. degree in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2016. His research interests include decision making under uncertainty and machine learning.

Vignesh Sundaresha

Vignesh Sundaresha is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He previously worked at AMD as a Silicon Design Engineer. He obtained his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2021. His Master’s thesis on “Design of Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Decoder for 5G NR” was completed as part of a collaboration with EPFL. His current research interests involve designing efficient, explainable, and analyzable algorithms for computer vision tasks.

Nghia Dai Nguyen

Nghia Dai Nguyen is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science as a VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC) Fellow. He received his B.S. degree in computer science from VinUniversity in 2024. His research interests include smart health and causal inference.

Haizi Yu

Haizi Yu is a research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and co-founder of Kocree, Inc. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Automatic Concept Learning via Information Lattices,” in the group in 2019. He received his M.S. degree in computer science from Stanford University, and his B.S. degree from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University. His research interests include machine learning, interpretable feature learning, automatic knowledge discovery, and music intelligence. He was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago.

Past Members

Yu Wen

Yu Wen was a Postdoctoral Associate in the group at the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Houston, his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida, and his B.S. in Computer Science and Technology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research spans AI algorithms, applications, and systems, with interdisciplinary interests in computer architecture and computer graphics. He is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston.

Akhil Bhimaraju

Akhil Bhimaraju is a graduate student and Promise of Excellence Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2020. His research is generally based on mathematical modeling of engineering problems.

Moulik Choraria

Moulik Choraria is a graduate student and Sarwate Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his M.S. thesis, entitled “The Inductive Bias of Polynomial Neural Networks,” at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2021 and received a B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 2019. His research interests include deep learning and information theory.

Aditya Deshmukh

Aditya Deshmukh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024. He received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2017. His research interests lie the areas of statistical inference, information theory, machine learning, reinforcement learning, optimization, and high-dimensional statistics.

Austin Ellis-Mohr

Austin Ellis-Mohr is a graduate student and DIGI-MAT fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University. His research interests include artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and emergence.

Ibtihal Ferwana

Ibtihal Ferwana is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science. She completed her M.S. thesis “Social patterns in knowledge evolution and health policy” in the group in 2022 and received her B.S. degree in computer science from Prince Sultan University in 2019. Her research interests include natural language processing, network science, and data science.

Anuj K. Nayak

Anuj K. Nayak is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University in 2018 and B. E. degree in electronics and communications engineering from PES Institute of Technology in 2014. He was with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Signalchip Innovations, Pvt. Ltd. as a Modem Systems Engineer. His research interests include information theory, machine learning and network science.

Xinbo Wu

Xinbo Wu is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. His research interests include large language models, AI alignment, multimodal models, and AI for science.

Vignesh Srinivasakumar

Vignesh Srinivasakumar completed his M.C.S. degree in 2025, while he was a graduate student in the group. He had completed his B.Tech. from the Vellore Institute of Technology in 2021 and received praise for his research and development work from the Prime Minister of India. His research focuses on vision and video-language models. He is now with Nvidia.

Sourya Basu

Sourya Basu completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Group theory and Information Theory Algorithms in Deep Learning,” in the group in 2024 as a Sarwate Fellow / ECE Distinguished Research Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his M.S. thesis, “Universal and Succinct Source Coding of Deep Neural Networks,” in the group in 2020 and received a B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2017. His research interests include information theory and its applications. He is now with Amazon Web Services.

Alayt Issak

Alayt Issak was a post-baccalaureate research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. She completed her B.A. degree in mathematics and studio art from the College of Wooster in 2021. Her research interests lie at the intersection of visual art, creativity, and AI. She is now completing a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Design and Media at Northeastern University.

Anant Naik

Anant Naik completed his M.D. at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine in 2023. He received his B. Eng. in biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities in 2018. His research interests are neurodegenerative disorders, spinal cord regeneration, and modeling neural circuits. He is now completing his residency in Neurological Surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Huozhi Zhou

Huozhi Zhou completed his Ph.D. thesis, “Interactive Learning in Nonstationary Environments,” in the group in 2023. He completed his M.S. thesis, “Algorithms on Graph-Structured Data with Imperfect Information,” in the group in 2019. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. His research interests include statistical inference, network algorithms and machine learning. He is now with Huawei.

Pritam Bose

Pritam Bose was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow in the group and also affiliated with the Oslo University Hospital in Norway. He received his Ph.D. degree in medicine from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo in 2019, his M.S. degree in telecommunications engineering from the University of Trento in 2016, and his B.Tech. degree in electronics and communications engineering from the West Bengal University of Technology in 2013. His research interests include communication system design for wireless medical technologies, medical signal processing, wireless body area networks, and machine learning. He is now with Kongsberg Maritime.

Suyoung Park

Suyoung Park completed his M.S. in Statistics-Analytics in 2021, while a graduate student in the group. He had received his B.S. degree in Economics and Statistics with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018. His research interests are in the area of generalized linear models, causal inference, and quantitative genetic analysis. He is currently a data scientist at Bayer.

Pankaj Sharma

Pankaj Sharma completed his M.S. in Statistics in 2021, while a graduate student in the group. He received his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in 2017. His research interests include machine learning and data science. He is now with Bayer.

Sam Spencer

Sam Spencer completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Rumor Source Identification, Contagion Processes, and Dynamics of Social Network Formation and Evolution,” in the group in 2020, where he as a CSE Fellow and focused on social and societal networks. He had received B.A. degrees in mathematics and in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He had worked for several years at Rockwell-Collins before returning to Illinois to complete doctoral studies. He is now with The MITRE Corporation..

Ruby Zhuang

Ruby Zhuang completed her M.S. thesis, “Science of Science: Biological Research Network, in the group in 2019, where her research interests included data science and computer engineering. She had received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. She is now with Google.

Alan Yang

Alan Yang was a Carver Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a graduate student in the group, where his research interests included information theory and cognition. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018.

Daewon Seo

Daewon Seo completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Information-Theoretic Analysis of Human-Machine Mixed Systems,” in the group in 2019, where he worked largely on problems in information theory and its applications. He had received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2008 and 2010, respectively. He is now an assistant professor at DGIST.

Ravi Kiran Raman

Ravi Kiran Raman completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “On the Information Theory of Clustering, Registration, and Blockchains,” in the group in 2019, where he was a Bahl Fellow and had primary research interests in understanding the fundamental limits of noisy computation systems and statistical inference problems using information theory. He had received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, in 2014. He is now a research scientist at Analog Devices.

Xiou Ge

Xiou Ge completed his M.S. thesis, “Computational Creativity Applications in Engineering,” in the group in 2018, where his main interests were artificial intelligence and creativity. He had received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016 and 2018, respectively. He is now a graduate student at the University of Southern California.

Rebecca Chen

Rebecca Chen completed her M.S. thesis, “Missing Values Imputation and Image Registration for Genetics Applications” in the group in 2019, where her research interests included image processing and machine learning. She had received a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015.

Sakshi Agarwal

Sakshi Agarwal completed her M.S. thesis, “A Study on Creativity: Detection and Network Structures,” in the group in 2019, where her research interests included information theory and machine learning. She had received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay in 2017. She is now with Google.

Yongjune Kim

Yongjune Kim was a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Seoul National University and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include coding and information theory for nanoscale devices, resource-constrained machine learning, and energy efficient computing. He is now on the faculty at Postech in Korea.

Ting-Yi Wang

Ting-Yi Wang was a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory from Fall 2016 until Spring 2017. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Chi-Nan University, Nantou, Taiwan, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Communication Engineering from National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2013. His research interests include information-attention theory, distributed programming, joint source-channel codes, and powerline communication. He is now on the faculty at Sun Yat-sen University.

Avhishek Chatterjee

Avhishek Chatterjee was a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory from Fall 2015 until Summer 2017. He had received the B.E. degree from Jadavpur University in 2006, the M.E. degree from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His research interests include understanding dynamics, fundamental limits, and optimal designs of stochastic networks like social networks, crowdsourcing systems, communication networks, and nanoscale circuits. He is now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Linjia Chang

Linjia Chang completed her M.S. thesis, “Changing Edges in Graphical Model Algorithms,” in the group in 2016, where her interests were primarily in stochastic information processing systems, coding theory, data analytics, and network analysis. She had received the B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014. She is now with Intel Corporation.

Aditya Vempaty

Aditya Vempaty completed his Ph.D. thesis, “Reliable Inference from Unreliable Agents,” in the group in 2015 for which he received the All University Doctoral Prize. He had received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, in 2011. He is now with the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Tyler Chen (2019-2020), Aditya Bhansali (2019-2020), Jiarui Sun (2018-2019), Abhinav Das (2018-2019), Cheshta Bhatia (2018), Wenxian Zhang (2017-2019), Kengyan Lim (2017-2019), Jianlin Du (2017-2018), Dennis Ryu (2016–2017), Sarah Schieferstein (2017), Fanbo Xiang (2017), Seungjun Cho (2017), Yirou Li (2017), Carolyn Nye (2017), Dingchen Yue (2017), Huozhi Zhou (2015–2017), Malhar Jere (2016–2017), Taehun Ahn (2016–2017), Seo Taek Kong (2016–2017), AJ Benjamin (2016), Dickens Li (2016), Sourya Basu (2016), Mayank Amencherla (2014–2016), You Guan (2015–2016), Song Jianhan (2015), Vei Wang Isaac Phua (2015), Chien-Sheng Yang (2015), Evan Phibbs (2015), Hongyang Bai (2014–2015), Rex Chen (2014–2015), Zhizhou He (2014–2015), Kaiqing Zhang (2014–2015), Matt Tsao (2014–2015), Johnny Duan (2014–2015), Dominic Gentile (2014–2015), Konrad Wrobel (2014–2015), Matthew Yang (2014–2015), and Mohammad Saad (2014) have all done some undergraduate research in the group.