Vishwak S

Hello there! I am Vishwak Srinivasan. I am a PhD student in the EECS department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I recently graduated with a Master of Science from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and completed my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad where I majored in Computer Science and Engineering with Honors. I am interested in theory-oriented research with a pinch of development. In the long run, I hope to become a faculty at a reputable university.

Machine Learning and Optimization
- Optimization methods for machine learning
- Statistical Learning Theory

My Google Scholar profile can be found here.

Things I've done during my high school days (click to know more)

2011	The first secretary of the Trivia Club, appointed for one year.
2011 2012 2013	Qualified for the Regional Mathematics Olympiad 3 three times
2012 2013	Won 2^nd place in 2012 and 6^th place in 2013 in the Times NIE Fundamental Quiz at Chennai, India.
2013	Topped the school in the CBSE board exams in Grade 10 - scored the highest CGPA possible: 10/10, tied with 8 others.
2015	Topped the school in the CBSE board exams in Grade 12, with 100% in both Mathematics and Computer Science with a total of 490/500. This placed me 5th in Chennai, India and 6th all over India in the Science Stream.
2015	Secured an All India Rank of 527 in the Joint Entrance Examination - Main (JEE Mains) and an All India Rank of 4637 in the Joint Entrance Examination - Advanced (JEE Advanced).

Things I've done during my undergraduate study: (click to know more)

2016	Received the Certificate of Excellence in Academics from IIT Hyderabad.
2017	Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Probability (MA 2110) by Dr. Balasubramaniam Jayaram.
2017 2018 2019	Started open-source software contributions, by contributing to PyTorch and projects in its ecosystem.
2018	Teaching Assistant for Discrete Structures - 2 (CS 1340) by Dr. Saketha Nath.
2018	Published ADINE: An Adaptive Momentum Method for Stochastic Gradient Descent in CoDS-COMAD 2018 with Dr. Balasubramanian.
2018	Received the Certificate of Excellence in Research from IIT Hyderabad.
2018	Secured the S N Bose Fellowship among 43 others out of ~1500 students across all fields of science and engineering in India.
2018	Teaching Assistant for Optimization Methods in Machine Learning: CS 6230 by Dr. Vineeth Balasubramanian.
2019	Teaching Assistant for Discrete Structures - 2 (CS 1340) by Dr. Maria Francis.
2019	Received the Certificate of Appreciation for Research in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Hyderabad.
2019	Graduated with honors!!

Things I've done during my master's: (click to know more)

2019	Worked with Adarsh Prasad and Dr. Pradeep Ravikumar on Robust Gradient Estimation.
2020	Worked with Adarsh Prasad and Dr. Pradeep Ravikumar on learning Ising models.
2020	Served on the Master of Science in Machine Learning Admissions Committee.
2020	Teaching Assistant for Convex Optimization: 10-725 by Dr. Yuanzhi Li for the Spring semester.
2020	Worked with Dr. Justin Khim and Dr. Pradeep Ravikumar on Subseasonal Climate Forecasting.
2020	Worked with Dhruv Malik and Dr. Yuanzhi Li on Policy Gradient Methods in Reinforcement Learning.
2020	Returning Teaching Assistant for Convex Optimization: 10-725 by Dr. Yuanzhi Li in the Fall.
2020	Joint work with Adarsh Prasad on learning Ising models under Huber contamination was accepted at NeurIPS 2020.
2020	Graduated!!
2021	Joint work with Dhruv Malik and Aldo Pacchiano on sample efficient reinforcement learning in continuous state spaces was accepted at ICML 2021.
2021	Joint work with Justin Khim on Bayesian spatial regression models for subseasonal climate forecasting over the Western US was accepted at UAI 2021.