CSE 446 Staff Info

Instructors

Natasha Jaques (website):
Background: I'm an Assistant Professor and a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. I lead the Social Reinforcement Learning (RL) group here in the Allen School, and our research is focused on RL fine-tuning of LLMs, Human-AI coordination, and multi-agent systems.
Conversation Starter: I'm Canadian and I'm into ranting about AI, reading about stuff outside of CS, and doing outside things.

Teaching Assistants

Donovan Clay (email):
Background: I am a third-quarter BS/MS student. For my undergraduate, I dual-degreed in Computer Engineering and Comparative History of Ideas. I'm a student researcher at Ai2, where I mostly do research in robotics as a part of the PRIOR team (doesn't exist anymore as of mid March). I also do some LLM research with Natasha! I've previously done research in hardware design for accelerating neural networks using FPGAs.
Conversation Starter: I like to play pool and rock climb in my free time. You might find me at the SBP in U district! Say hi!
Alice Gao (email):
Background: I'm a PhD student in CSE. My research primarily focuses on computationally understanding user interfaces (UIs) for different demographics.
Conversation Starter: I am a cat lover!
Claudia Gyonjyan (email):
Background: Hi, I'm a junior at the Allen School and am currently doing research at the intersection of AI/ML and genomics.
Conversation Starter: I love baking, hiking, and playing black ops zombies! My personal record in black ops 2 zombies is round 58 :)
Christina Hahn (email):
Background: I'm a second-quarter BS/MS student in CSE. I primarily do research in the NLP space, and my current project is on using game theory with LLMs.
Conversation Starter: Recently I've gotten back into reading for fun! I'm working my way through Rodney Merrill's translation of the Odyssey, which is (as far as I know) the only English translation that strictly preserves the poem's original dactylic hexameter rhythm.
Sankar Harilal (email):
Background: I'm a fourth year undergrad in CSE. Some of my research interests include domain adversarial learning, time series forecasting, and predictive modeling.
Conversation Starter: Some of my hobbies are snowboarding, watching soccer, and exploring new places!
Min Jang (email):
Background: I'm a third quarter BS/MS student. I do research in efficient reasoning for Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) using reinforcement learning.
Conversation Starter: I love playing/watching soccer! My favorite team is Chelsea :( I also love knitting and reading. I'm currently reading Wuthering Heights.
Leo Maynard-Zhang (email):
Background: I am a BS/MS student in CSE. I do research in machine learning theory.
Conversation Starter: I really like fried chicken.
Emmanuel 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 an ecological wildlife monitoring.
Conversation Starter: I am initially from Ghana and into international development and Afro-carribean music.
Hanwen Xu (email):
Background: I am a 4th year PhD candidate in CSE. I focus my research on AI for precision health.
Conversation Starter: I love outdoor activities, especially running.