Ioannis Panageas, Assistant Professor at ISTD was awarded the 2019 NRF fellowship for AI, a 3M SGD grant that will be effective in February 2020 for his proposal with title “Rigorous AI using Game Theory and Statistics”.

The broad objective of the proposed research is to address the need of satisfactory understanding of Artificial Intelligence by building empirically relevant theoretical foundations of deep learning.

The main goal of Ioannis’ research is to develop computationally efficient, robust, (a) optimization and (b) statistical methods with provable guarantees for many machine learning problems including the training deep models and regression.

The motivation of Ioannis’ research

The last five years we have witnessed the entering of AI (one main reason of its recent success is deep learning) in our daily lives, some aspects of which are sensitive (like autonomous driving, healthcare), and thus there is a need to develop computationally efficient and robust algorithms with theoretical (provable) guarantees (e.g., self-driving cars trained so that provably they will not misclassify objects, i.e., the used classification algorithms will not be based mainly on ”heuristics”).

Ioannis’ Bio

Ioannis Panageas joined SUTD as an Assistant Professor in September 2018. Prior to that he was a MIT postdoctoral fellow working with Constantinos Daskalakis. He received his PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization from Georgia Institute of Technology under the guidance of Prasad Tetali in 2016, a Diploma in EECS from National Technical University of Athens (summa cum laude) and a M.Sc. in Mathematics from Georgia Institute of Technology (summa cum laude). His work lies on the intersection of optimization, probability, learning theory, dynamical systems and algorithms.