I am an associate professor of computer science at Amherst College, where I lead the Data* Mammoths, a research&learning group of brilliant undergraduate students, and I serve as the inaugural director of the Data Science Initiative. I also have an appointment as visiting faculty in Computer Science at Brown University. Previously, I spent some fantastic years as a research scientist in the Labs group at Two Sigma.
My research focuses on algorithms for knowledge discovery, data mining, and machine learning. I develop theory and methods to extract the most information from large datasets, as fast as possible and in a statistically sound way. The problems I study include pattern extraction, graph mining, and time series analysis. My algorithms often use concepts from statistical learning theory and sampling. My research is supported, in part, by NSF CAREER Award #2238693 and by NSF Award #2006765.
My Erdős number is 3 (Erdős → Suen → Upfal → Matteo), and I am a mathematical descendant of Eli Upfal, Eli Shamir (2nd generation), Jacques Hadamard (5th), Siméon Denis Poisson (9th), and Pierre-Simon Laplace (10th).
News
- DSI: I was appointed the inaugural director of the Data Science Initiative. I'm excited, and looking forward to the (large) amount of work ahead.
- Dagstuhl: With Eli and Aris, I'm organizing a 5-day workshop on Statistical and Probabilistic Methods in Algorithmic Data Analysis in Dagstuhl. So glad to go back to the beautiful Schlöss!
- KDD'24: Happy to help out the organization as a Co-chair of the PhD Consortium.
- CogMI: I am giving an invited talk on Statistically-sound KDD at this interesting conference bringing together researchers from different areas.
- KAIS: the journal version of Alice was accepted to the KAIS special issue for the best papers of IEEE ICDM'22.
- Tenure+Promotion: Since July 1, I am a tenured associate professor of computer science! I'm over the moon about this!
- NSF CAREER: I received a $600k NSF CAREER award to work on Statistically-sound Knowledge Discovery from Data (my SDM'23 blue-sky-idea paper has more details about what I plan to do). I am extremely thankful for the trust from the community and NSF, and excited for 5 years of work ahead!
- DMKD/DAMI (ECML PKDD'23): the Data* Mammoths published another paper: Maryam and Alex introduce ROhAN, a new set of null models for Statistically-sound KDD.
- News archive