Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
| email: | garnett at wustl dot edu |
|---|---|
| phone: | (314) 935–4992 |
| address: | Washington University in St. Louis One Brookings Drive, CB 1045 St. Louis, MO 63130 |
I joined the CSE faculty at Wash U in January 2015. Before arriving here, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Knowledge Discovery and Machine Learning research group at the University of Bonn (2012–2014) and the Auton Lab at Carnegie Mellon University (2010–2012). I completed my PhD as a member of the Machine Learning Research Group at the University of Oxford in 2010, and received an AB and MSc from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004.
You can find my CV here.
Broadly, my research concerns Bayesian experimental design. I am especially interested in applications to scientific discovery, and received an NSF CAREER award to support this research. Two particular problems of focus are:
Bayesian optimization, where we seek to globally optimize an expensive objective function. Bayesian optimization has seen widespread successful use across a range of application domains across the sciences and engineering, including in machine learning itself for tuning the hyperparameters of complex models. DeepMind recently used Bayesian optimization to learn architectures as part of AlphaGo Zero.
I wrote a wrote book on Bayesian optimization! It is available free to download.
You may find a list of my publications here, or may wish to refer to my Google Scholar profile.
Thanks for your interest! Here is some advice for those seeking to work with me:
Master's and undergraduate students at Wash U: if you are seeking to complete a master's thesis, a master's project, or an undergraduate independent study with me, I strongly suggest you take my course on Bayesian machine learning. I have successfully completed numerous projects with both undergraduate and graduate students who have taken the course, and these collaborations have led to several publications.
If you wish to pursue such a project, please identify a project and a potential plan for completing it before approaching me. These projects are meant to be student led, and you will get much more out of the project if you have a personal connection to it.