CSE 446 Staff Info

Instructors

Natasha Jaques:
Background: I am a new Assistant Professor at UW and a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. My research is focused on Social Reinforcement Learning: learning from other intelligent agents like humans (e.g. via RLHF), or in multi-agent systems.
Conversation Starter: I have a two year old son, I'm originally from Canada, and I love doing outside things.

Teaching Assistants

Varun Ananth (email):
Background: I am a first year Computer Science BS/MS student. I do research at the intersection of systems neuroscience and ML, currently working on training RNNs to model neuron reponses to photostimulation.
Conversation Starter: My other interests span math, politics, reading, guitar, and gongfu tea. Ask me about the tea.
Emmanuel Azuh Mensah (email):
Background: I am a PhD student in the ICT for Development Lab within the Allen school. My research mainly focuses on developing data conditional subnetworks as an efficiency approach for on-device single-tower multimodal mobile vision transformers, and applied to ecological wildlife monitoring.
Conversation Starter: I am initially from Ghana and into international development and Afro-carribean music.
Donovan Clay (email):
Background: I am an undergraduate double majoring in Computer Engineering and Comparative History of Ideas. I do research in robotics and also in implementing neural-network ML models on FPGAs. I'm in my 3rd and last year at UW.
Conversation Starter: I like to play pool and rock climb in my free time. You might find me at SBP!
Marco Hendra Dani (email):
Background: I am a third year undergraduate in Computer Science (Data Science) and I do research at the intersection between Robotics and Data. I am currently working on a visualization tools for large robot-learning datasets.
Conversation Starter: I love Kickboxing, Wrestling, Muay Thai and I compete in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu! I am also passionate about repetitive strain injury therapy.
Saket Gollapudi (email):
Background: Wazzup! I am a first year BS/MS Student. I am currently doing research surrounding differential privacy with large language models and have previous research experience with robotics.
Conversation Starter: I am a HUGE sports fan (especially football....Go Seahawks!) and will be spending most of my free time following the NBA Playoffs and the IPL season (cricket). I enjoy playing basketball, singing, and watching movies. ✌️
Sankar Vaishnav Harilal (email):
Background: I'm a third year undergrad majoring in Computer Science. I do research focused on applying machine learning to optimize processes in chemistry and nuclear domains, particularly with domain adversarial learning, time series forecasting, and predictive modeling.
Conversation Starter: Some of my hobbies are snowboarding, watching soccer, and exploring new places!
Leo Maynard-Zhang (email):
Background: I'm an undergrad majoring in CSE. My interests are in reinforcement learning, game theory, and machine learning theory. Currently, I do research in linear bandit theory.
Conversation Starter: I am trying to learn Mandarin Chinese.
Yiping Wang (email):
Background: I'm a 2nd year PhD in CSE working with Prof. Simon Du. I'm currently exploring LLM + RL training and data selection.
Conversation Starter: I like playing table tennis very much!
Cleah Taryn Winston (email):
Background: I'm a 3rd year undergrad in CSE, and I'm excited to be TAing this quarter. Apart from classes, I have been involved in research at the robotics lab as well several healthcare-tech projects.
Conversation Starter: I enjoy basketball, tennis, and playing flute!
Anthony Xing (email):
Background: I am a 3rd-year undergrad double majoring in CS and MATH. I like watching interesting history/science videos and anime/movies, and I play a few video games. I swim from time to time and I've been doing more weightlifting recently.
Conversation Starter: I find interest in many things!