Lam M. Nguyen           

I am a Research Scientist at IBM Research AI, Thomas J. Watson Research Center working in the intersection of Optimization and Machine Learning/Deep Learning.

I got my Ph.D. degree in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University in 2018. I was working with Dr. Katya Scheinberg and Dr. Martin Takáč in the area of Large Scale Optimization for Machine Learning and Stochastic Optimization. I have proposed a new algorithm for machine learning problems called SARAH (which is named after my daughter's name Sarah H. Nguyen) for solving convex and nonconvex large scale optimization problems. This paper is published in The 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2017). During my Ph.D., I was also working with Dr. Alexander Stolyar in the area of Applied Probability, Stochastic Models and Optimal Control. I have won the 2019 P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science Elizabeth V. Stout Dissertation Award.

I was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, but grew up in Moscow, Russia. I got my Bachelor degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Faculty (Department) of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Vladimir I. Dmitriev. I also received my M.B.A. degree from McNeese State University, Louisiana in 2013. Moreover, I was a Software Engineer at FPT Software Company.

Fields of interest:

• Optimization for Representation Learning
• Design and Analysis of Learning Algorithms
• Deep Reinforcement Learning
• AI Solutions for Industry Research

- Selected conference reviewers: ICML (Area Chair), NIPS/NeurIPS, ICLR (Area Chair), AISTATS, AAAI, IJCAI, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, UAI.
- Selected journal reviewers: Journal of Machine Learning Research, Mathematical Programming, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Optimization Methods and Software.