Mathematical foundations of AI workshop

Alicia Curth (opens in new tab)

Senior Researcher

I am a Senior Researcher currently working on monitoring and control in the context of large language models. My previous research has spanned statistical guarantees for LLMs, deep learning phenomena such as benign overfitting and double descent, and methods for estimating personalized treatment effects. More broadly, I am interested in how statistical principles can help us better understand, evaluate, and improve modern machine learning systems.

Wenbo Gong (opens in new tab)

Senior Researcher

I’m a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working on optimization, learning dynamics and efficient training of large-scale foundation models. His research focuses on developing new optimization algorithms and training methods that improve the efficiency, stability, and capability of foundation models, spanning both pre-training and reinforcement learning post-training. He has worked on topics including efficient optimizers, causal machine learning, and efficient learning systems. More recently, his work has focused on efficient training algorithms for reasoning and agentic AI systems.

Shushrut Karmalkar

Senior Researcher

I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, specializing in machine learning theory, statistics, and robust algorithms. My current research focuses on the theoretical foundations of transformer architectures, mechanistic interpretability, and masked diffusion models. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UT Austin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UW-Madison.

Teodora Pandeva

Senior Researcher

I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where I began as a resident in the Machine Intelligence group working on diffusion models for text generation. My current research focuses on understanding and improving LLM-based systems for automating scientific discovery. Before joining Microsoft, my research was focused on the intersection of causal inference and AI for Science.

Niranjani Prasad

Principal Research Manager

I am a Senior Researcher in Machine Intelligence at Microsoft Research based in Cambridge (UK). My current research focuses on principled approaches to understanding and advancing reliable reasoning in generative AI, drawing from reinforcement learning, causal inference and neuro-symbolic frameworks.

John Winn

Senior Principal Researcher

I have been a machine learning researcher at Microsoft Research for twenty-plus years, with a focus on modelling and probabilistic methods in domains ranging from computer vision to computational biology. My current focus is on improving information retrieval and memory in LLMs for agentic computing applications.

Javier Zazo

Senior Researcher