Kumar Krishna Agrawal
email:  krishna@eecs.berkeley.edu

I am a PhD candidate at EECS, UC Berkeley. I am broadly interested in algorithms and systems for efficient, reliable & human-centric machine learning. Previously I was an AI resident at Google Brain, working on fast, simple algorithms for off-policy robot learning, generative models, program synthesis. Before this, I studied mathematics and computer science at IIT Kharagpur, where I worked on multi-modal representation learning for my master's thesis.

Research: I am broadly interested in empirics, theory which furthers our understanding of learning algorithms in interactive, uncertain environments; and translates to building efficient, scalable real-world systems. Some recent themes include:

  1. assessing trainability and model selection for self-supervised representation learning
  2. leveraging suboptimal data for offline, inverse reinforcement learning
  3. efficient systems for large-scale model training, inference
  4. structured and compositional generative models (for programs, vision, audio)
Research opportunities: If you are an undergraduate at Berkeley and interested in learning more about neural-networks, machine learning; please send me an email.

about / teaching / writing / reading / github / gscholar



bookshelf

Reasonable approximation of physical books I often revisit.

  • 36 Lectures in Biology
  • A theory of the consumption function
  • A mathematician's apology
  • A History of Economic Theory
  • Advice for a Young Investigator -- Ramon Cajal
  • Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait
  • Antifragile
  • Being Mortal
  • Behave : The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
  • Birth of a Theorem
  • Connections
  • Convex Optimization
  • Development as Freedom
  • Elements of Information Theory
  • Free to Choose
  • Functional Differential Geometry
  • How to Read and Why
  • High Dimensional Statistics : A Non-Asymptotic Viewpoint
  • Lifespan : Why we age, & why we don't have to
  • Madame Curie: A Biography
  • Making of the Atomic Bomb
  • Man's Search for Meaning
  • Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming
  • Notes of a Native Son
  • Parallel Distributed Processing
  • Perfectly Reasonable Deviations
  • Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
  • Poor Economics
  • Projections : A Story of Human Emotions
  • Principles of Computer System Design
  • Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
  • Sapiens : A brief history of humankind
  • Siddhartha
  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
  • The Biology of Cancer
  • The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal
  • The Collected Works : Kahlil Gibran
  • The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
  • The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1, 2, 3
  • The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
  • The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
  • The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell
  • The Sciences of the Artificial
  • The Score Takes Care of Itself
  • The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  • The Book Of Why : The New Science of Cause & Effect
  • Thinking Fast & Slow
  • Vision -- David Marr

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