Assistant Professor, UCSB ECE
Affiliated Faculty, UCSB CS
Co-director of REAL AI 🦾
📧 first name at ucsb dot edu
💼 Harold Frank Hall 3161
🎓 Ph.D @ Carnegie Mellon University
🎓 B.Eng @ KAIST
📣
We’re hiring two postdoc positions at REAL AI. See more information here.
🚀
Check out our REAL AI Bootcamp launching this September! All highschool students are welcome 😊
📣
Our Lab News(Sep ‘25) We’re launching REAL AI Bootcamp in collaboration with UCSB’ School of Scientific Thought program.
(Aug ‘25) Congratulations Rasta for passing the Major Area Exam at UCSB’s CS department 🥳
(Jul ‘25)Sid presented a poster on “CosmoFlow: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Cosmology with Flow Matching” at ICML 2025 Workshop on ML4Astro.
(Jul ‘25)Rasta’s work on “FAIM: Fair Imputation with Adversarial Training for Mitigating Bias in Missing Data” got accepted at ICML 2025 workshop on DataWorld: Unifying Data Curation Frameworks Across Domains. (Jun ‘25)Arjun gave a talk on our paper “Gone With the Bits: Revealing Racial Bias in Low-Rate Neural Compression for Facial Images” at FAccT 2025. In parallel, Tian and Rasta, two other PhD students who led the project, presented a poster at “Learn to Compress & Compress to Learn” workshop at ISIT 2025.
(Jun ‘25) Congratulations Iain Weissburg for graduation👨🏻🎓🎉 He has participated in three papers while he was working at our lab. Incredible achievement and exciting next step at Nvidia!
(May ‘25)Iain and Sathvika presented our work on “LLMs are biased teachers: Evaluating llm bias in personalized education” at NAACL 2025.
(Apr ‘25)Youngseok presented our work on “Model Collapse in the Self-Consuming Chain of Diffusion Finetuning: A Novel Perspective from Quantitative Trait Modeling” at the DATA-FM@ICLR’25 workshop.
(Apr ‘25) Our collaborator Richard (JP Morgan AI Research) presented our work on "Can We Catch the Two Birds of Fairness and Privacy?” at theFinancial AI @ICLR 2025 workshop.
(Apr ‘25)PI Jeong presented a paper on “Correlated privacy mechanisms for differentially private distributed mean estimation” at SatML ‘25.
(Feb ‘25)PI Jeong gave a public talk at Pacific Views Lecture Series on “Ethical AI: Serving Humanity or Falling Short?”
Research
Our lab’s mission is to do science for machine learning and machine learning for science. We advance our fundamental understanding of machine learning algorithms and we apply data-driven approaches to solve challenging scientific problems. Specifically, our lab’s research centers around three research themes: reliable computing for ML, responsible AI, and ML for science. See below for more information about each theme.
Keywords:Machine Learning, Responsible AI, Algorithmic Fairness, Generative Models, Information Theory, Differential Privacy, Distributed Computing, Fault-tolerant Computing, Quantum Computing, AI for Science, AstroAI
Research Themes
Responsible AI
🏛️
Responsible AI
Reliable Computing (Classical + Quantum)
🤖
Reliable Computing (Classical + Quantum)
ML for Science
🔬
ML for Science
Current Lab Members
Rasta Tadayon
🐈
Rasta Tadayon
4th year PhD Student (CS)
🏛️Responsible AI
rastadayon.github.io
Neel Sankaran
👽
Neel Sankaran
2nd year Masters Student (ECE)
🔬ML for Science
Sid Kannan
🐻
Sid Kannan
4th Year Undergrad, Physics and Computing
🔬ML for Science
sidk2.github.io
Rohan Bhatt
🎾
Rohan Bhatt
3rd Year Physics Undergraduate Student
🏛️Responsible AI
Daniel Holmberg
🌊
Daniel Holmberg
4th year PhD Student
🔬ML for Science
danielholmberg.fi
Arjun Nichani
⚾
Arjun Nichani
3rd year PhD Student (CS)
🏛️Responsible AI
arjunnichani.com
Tian Qiu
Tian Qiu
2nd year PhD Student (ECE)
🏛️Responsible AI🔬ML for Science
qiutiantxwd.github.io
Youngseok Yoon
🙈
Youngseok Yoon
2nd year PhD Student (ECE)
🏛️Responsible AI
youngseok-yoon.github.io
Lab Alumni
Dainong Hu
Dainong Hu
MS Alumni
🏛️Responsible AI
Harold Mo
Harold Mo
BS Alumni
🏛️Responsible AI
Iain Weissburg
🎋
Iain Weissburg
BS/MS Alumni; Now MLE @ Nvidia
🏛️Responsible AI
Jack Shoemaker
Jack Shoemaker
BS Alumni
🏛️Responsible AI
Jai Uparkar
🎋
Jai Uparkar
alumni
🏛️Responsible AI
Cheryl Stanley
🌻
Cheryl Stanley
BS Alumni, Now at UCSD
🏛️Responsible AI
Jin Lee
😎
Jin Lee
MS alumni, Currently a UCSB PhD student
🤖Reliable Computing (Classical + Quantum)🔬ML for Science
S’24 Lab Dinner 🌮
S’25 Lab Dinner 🥙
Teaching
ECE 594BB: Deep Generative Models (W’24)
ECE 283: Machine Learning (S’23, S’24, S’25)
ECE 594BB: Ethics for Machine Learning (W’23, W’25)