Ali Siahkamari Ties for First Place in the 2021 CISE Best Student Paper Award
Ali Siahkamari, Boston University PhD candidate (ECE), tied for first place in the 2021 CISE Best Student Paper Award Competition. His winning paper, entitled “Piecewise Linear Regression via a Difference of Convex Functions,” was published in Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning. This paper was co-authored with his advisor, CISE Faculty Affiliate, Associate Professor Brian Kulis (ECE, SE), as well as Aditya Gangrade (PhD candidate, ECE) and CISE Faculty Affiliate, Professor Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE).
Siahkamari’s paper presents a new innovative idea and algorithm, connecting statistics, optimization, and machine learning concepts. The proposed methodology allows for studying regression problems when there is not much knowledge on choosing a model.
“In a sense, it tries to provide an automatic procedure to explain the relationship between some input and output features without much human supervision and bias,” explained Siahkamari.
The paper demonstrates theoretical, statistical and practical results of the proposed algorithm. The research empirically validates this new method, showing it to be practically implementable, and to outperform existing regression methods in accuracy on real-world datasets.
“This work has applications to learning distance functions and distributions, as well as anomaly detection. It’s an exciting research direction, and Ali’s contributions have been fundamental,” said Kulis. He also explained that this research is part of a larger project that Siahkamari has been leading as part of his dissertation on nonparametric convex function learning.
“I really enjoyed working and learning from my co-authors,” Siahkamari says. “There’s a lot of value when dealing with equations, solving them, and providing ready-to-use code to the scientific community.”
Siahkamari is a fourth-year PhD student specializing in statistical machine learning, as well as designing new algorithms/models for regression and metric learning. When not doing research, he enjoys biking, practicing martial arts, playing guitar, and hanging out with friends.
The CISE Best Student Paper Award Competition is an annual event established to promote student research and to recognize the scientific quality and scope of research being conducted by CISE students. This year, 16 CISE faculty affiliates from the College of Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences evaluated the submitted papers based on both academic significance and broader impact.