Professor Alejandro Ribeiro
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab! My name is Alejandro Ribeiro (aribeiro@seas.upenn.edu) and I am very much looking forward to working with you in this course. I am grateful to my colleagues at Penn for allowing me the opportunity to teach it. I believe that we are reaching the point at which AI technologies can have a big impact in our society and it fills me with joy that I have the chance to contribute. You should ask me why I believe in the transformational power of AI in person. My belief rests in somewhat unexpected places that have little to do with what we hear in media.
My research group is well known for its contributions to the fundamental understanding of AI information processing architectures. We try to determine what are the operations that we should perform on data to generate intelligent behavior and why do these operations should be expected to work or not. We are also active in developing theory and algorithms for learning with requirements. This has to do with developing AI systems that are good according to several metrics. They make, say, decisions that are within a specified range of optimal but are also fair and safe. Our application domains are multiagent autonomous systems, wireless communication networks, and network neuroscience.
I strive to be a good teacher and sometimes succeed. I am very proud to be the recipient of the 2012 S. Reid Warren, Jr. Award presented by the students of the School of Engineering and Applied Science for distinguished teaching and the 2017 Lindback award presented by my Penn colleagues for the same reason.
I also strive to be a good scientist and in this endeavor I am very much helped by the remarkable work of my doctoral students and postdocs. Their papers have received a number of awards which I am happy to claim as my own. These awards are the 2022 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE Brain Initiative Student Paper Award, the 2021 Cambridge Ring Publication of the Year Award, the 2020 Signal Processing Society young author best paper award and the 2014 O. Hugo Schuck best paper award. They also include paper awards at the 2020 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, the 2019 European Signal Processing Conference, the 2017 Conference on Decision and Control, the 2016 Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing, the 2015 Asilomar Conference on Signals Systems and computers, the 2013 American Control Conference, and the 2005 and 2006 International Conferences on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. I am a Fulbright Scholar class of 2003 and a Penn Fellow class of 2015.
Teaching Assistants
Javier Porras-Valenzuela (jporras@seas.upenn.edu) is a second year PhD. student advised by Prof. Alejandro Ribeiro. His research interests include graph neural networks, transformers, reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization. Originally from Heredia, Costa Rica, he holds a BSc. in Software Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (2015) and an MSc. in Computer Science from Tecnológico de Costa Rica (2022). He enjoys chess, hikes, and taking pictures in front of brick walls.
Varun Chitturi ( varchi@seas.upenn.edu) is a second year undergrad. His interests span distributed systems, machine learning, optimization, web/mobile development, and more. He is also on the varsity squash team and likes to do photography.
Teresa Shang (tshang@seas.upenn.edu) is a second year undergrad. Her research interests include transformers, language modeling, and image generation. She is from Shenyang, China, and she enjoys dancing, ice skating, and playing the flute.
Claren Ogira (ogira@seas.upenn.edu) is a second year undergraduate student from Nairobi, Kenya studying Computer Engineering. His interests revolve around image analysis, reinforcement learning and large language models. During his free time, he plays chess and travels.
Vishva Gajaraj (vgajaraj@seas.upenn.edu) is a second-year undergrad from New Jersey studying Computer Science. His research interests include video analysis and natural language processing. In his free time, he enjoys lifting and playing basketball.
Khush Sabuwala (khsabu@seas.upenn.edu) is a fourth year undergrad from New Jersey studying Systems Engineering. His research interests include control systems, autonomous vehicles, and energy efficiency. In his free time, he enjoys cooking and watching football.