Dec 11, 2024 · 17 min read

Hazy Alumni Life Updates (2024)

Christopher Ré

With the annual celebration of machine learning that is NeurIPS underway, we thought it would be fun to celebrate the amazing accomplishments of our own Hazy alumni! 🤩

We're constantly amazed by what they have accomplished -- from landing on the inaugural Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI (2x!) to founding unicorn startups (several!) to winning NSF CAREER Awards (4x!) to earning a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 (3x!) and too many orals, spotlights, and best papers to count, our former lab members have been busy leaving their mark on the AI landscape.

But beyond their individual accomplishments, what makes us most proud is the work they’ve done to shape the future of AI as professors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and engineers. So please join us in celebrating their amazing accomplishments!

Table of contents:

Albert Gu

Cartesia | CSO
CMU | Assistant Professor

What can we say that Time didn’t already cover in its profile of Albert as part of the inaugural Time Top 100 in AI? Before joining CMU as an assistant professor next year, Albert has been leading the SSM revolution while serving as Chief Scientific Officer of Cartesia.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2024 Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI
  • 2023 Amazon Research Award

Alex Ratner

Snorkel AI | CEO
University of Washington | Affiliate Assistant Professor

Currently on leave from his lab at UW to continue leading Snorkel AI on its journey from humble academic research project to multi-billion dollar company making data labeling 100x faster for enterprises!

Arjun Desai

Cartesia | Co-Founder

Arjun was recently selected to be on Forbes 30 Under 30 and is helping take SSMs to the moon at Cartesia after graduating from the lab last year! 🎉

Armin Thomas

Liquid AI | Technical Staff

Joined Liquid AI as a technical staff member working on novel ML architectures.

Arun Kumar

RapidFire AI | Cofounder and CTO
University of California, San Diego | Associate Professor (on leave)

Arun has been piling up awards over the past few years for his work on DL systems, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree -- his first PhD student, Supun Nakandala, won the 2023 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Awards

  • 2024 VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award
  • 2024 ACM SIGMOD Distinguished Associate Editor
  • 2021: NSF CAREER Award
  • 2021: IEEE TCDE Rising Star Awards

Beidi Chen

CMU | Assistant Professor
RapidFire AI | Research Scientist

Started the InfiniAI lab at CMU, selected as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT, and just had two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2024 as spotlights! 👀 Beidi is currently looking for new students -- if you’re applying to the CMU PhD program, please reach out to her!

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2022 ICML Outstanding Paper Runner Up
  • 2021 MIT EECS Rising Stars
  • 2019 UIUC EECS Rising Stars

Braden Hancock

Meta | Director of AI

After co-founding Snorkel AI, found a new home this year at Meta as the Director of AI, leading the centralized Evaluations org responsible for evaluation strategy, development, tooling, and execution for all GenAI foundation models (e.g. Llama).

Brandon Yang

Cartesia | Co-Founder

After co-founding Cartesia, also earned a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 this year!

Ce Zhang

University of Chicago | Associate Professor
Together AI | CTO

When not serving as the CTO of one of the fastest growing VC-backed unicorns (Together AI), Ce runs a lab at the University of Chicago focused on distributed learning and efficient inference.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • Co Editor-in-Chief of the new publication DMLR
  • 2018 Google Focused Research Award

Christopher De Sa

Cornell | Professor
Together | Advisor

Chris recently received tenure as an associate professor at Cornell while leading the Relax ML Lab 🎉, staying just one step ahead of his amazing students like Ruqi and Cooper who’ve joined the faculty at Purdue and Yale. Chris recently served as Program Chair of MLSys 2024 and won a DARPA grant for decentralized fine-tuning of compressed foundation models.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2024 keynote at the International Conference on AI-ML Systems
  • 2024 DARPA grant - decentralized fine-tuning of compressed foundation models
  • 2021 Google Research Scholar Award
  • 2021 NSF CAREER Award

Dan Fu

UCSD | Assistant Professor
Together AI | Research Scientist

Pending his ability to fulfill basic PhD requirements, Dan will soon join UCSD as the newest member of the computer science faculty 🎉!

Also recently adopted a new kitten!

Notable Papers

Awards

  • Stanford Open Source Software Prize 2024
  • NDSEG Award for Exemplary Impact and Relevance

Feng Niu

Evidently | CEO

Founded Evidently to empower clinicians to make better decisions, leading to happier clinicians, healthier patients, and improved financial ROI for hospitals

Fred Sala

UW Madison | Assistant Professor
Snorkel AI | Chief Scientist

When not serving as Chief Scientist of Snorkel AI, Fred has kept himself busy winning the 2024 DARPA Young Faculty Award for work on data-efficient decentralized foundation models and leading his lab at UW Madison focused on developing data-driven systems for machine learning.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2024 DARPA Young Faculty Award

Ines Chami

Numbers Station | Cofounder

Graduated from the lab 🎉 and cofounded Numbers Station to apply LLMs to structured data; before that, won the 2021 Stanford Gene Golub Doctoral Dissertation Award!

Jaeho Shin

Evidently | Chief Engineer

Cofounded Evidently to build tools that doctors and nurses love to use to improve the care they deliver to patients

Jared Dunnmon

Chief Scientist | Stealth Startup
Former Technical Director for AI | Defense Innovation Unit

Served as the first Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), during which he ran the DIU xView3 program (a public challenge resulting in ML models currently used to fight illegal fishing around the world) and built out the Emerging Capabilities Policy Office at the Pentagon. Recently cofounded a company focused on rebuilding the U.S. maritime industry.

Jason Fries

Research Scientist | Stanford University
Snorkel AI | Advisor

Working at the intersection of multimodal foundation models and healthcare, Jason has developed methods and datasets for unlocking the full potential of generative AI in real-world medical settings.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2021 HAI-AIMI Partnership Grant for developing multimodal patient embeddings

Karan Goel

Cartesia | CEO

Taking SSMs to the moon as CEO of Cartesia after graduating from the lab last year! 🎉 Currently looking for smart ML researchers (preferably named Brandon)

Khaled Saab

Google DeepMind | Research Scientist

Graduated from the lab 🎉 before joining Google DeepMind to push the state-of-the-art of using foundation models to improve healthcare through leading efforts like Med-Gemini and AMIE.

Notable Papers

Kun-Hsing Yu

Harvard Medical School | Assistant Professor

Published many amazing papers with his lab on AI and digital pathology, developed numerous tools for cancer diagnosis and treatment, and co-founded a biotech company for cancer pathology diagnosis.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • NIH R01 and R35 grants
  • Department of Defense (DoD) Career Development Award
  • American Cancer Society Research Award
  • Google Research Scholar Award

Kush Bhatia

Google Deepmind | Research Scientist

Finished his postdoc at Hazy Research 🎉 and joined Google Deepmind

Notable Papers

Awards

  • JP Morgan PhD Fellowship 2020

Nancy Xu

Moonhub | CEO
Xu Ventures | Founder, General Partner

Another Time 100 AI honoree! Built the world's first AI Recruiter as the founder of Moonhub and is a WEF Technology Pioneer

Awards

  • 2024 Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI
  • WEF Technology Pioneer

Nimit Sohoni

Cartesia | Researcher

Joined Cartesia as an early member of the research staff after working at Citadel for 2 years!

Sarah Hooper

National Institutes of Health | Research Scientist

Graduated from the lab! 🎉 Decided being an academic didn’t involve enough bureaucracy and is now a research scientist at the NIH’s Office of AI Research.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2023 Human-Centered AI and GCP Research Proposal
  • Hertz Foundation Fellowship

Sharon Li

UW-Madison | Assistant Professor

Recently named “2023 Innovator of the Year” by MIT Technology Review after running out of other awards to win. Her lab at UW Madison focuses on algorithmic and theoretical foundations of reliable machine learning, addressing challenges in both model development and deployment in the open world!

Notable Papers

Awards

  • 2023 Innovator of the Year by MIT Technology Review
  • 2023 NSF CAREER Award
  • 2022 AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award
  • 2022 Amazon Research Award
  • 2021 Google-Initiated Focused Research Award
  • 2021 Facebook Research Award
  • 2021 JP Morgan Early-career Faculty Award
  • 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30
  • 2019 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in AI

Silas Alberti

Cognition AI | Founding Engineer

Automating himself out of a job while building Devin as a founding engineer at Cognition AI

Stephen Bach

Brown | Assistant Professor
Snorkel AI | Advisor

In addition to leading the BATS research group at Brown, co-led one of the teams that proposed instruction tuning, released the T0 family of models, and achieved top performance on zero-shot image classification in DARPA's Learning with Less Labeling program.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • Co-PI on DARPA grant “Tasks Algorithmically Given Labels Established via Transferred Symbols”
  • NSF grant to develop an LLM-backed research assistant for comprehensive climate assessments

Theo Rekatsinas

Apple | Research Scientist

Currently at Apple enabling smaller generative models to have the capabilities of frontier models via data selection methods after his data cleaning company, Inductiv, was acquired. In a previous life, was a Professor at UW Madison and ETH working on a $5M DARPA grant for scientific discovery and semantic analytics

Tri Dao

Princeton | Assistant Professor
Together AI | Chief Scientist

Starting a new lab at Princeton next year 🎉 after doing a stint as Chief Scientist of Together AI! Made transformers significantly more scalable with FlashAttention 1/2/3, then decided to burn it all down with Mamba.

Notable Papers

Awards

  • Stanford Open Source Software Prize 2024

Vincent Chen

Snorkel AI | Founding Engineer, VP

Still working on Snorkel AI!

Virginia Smith

Carnegie Mellon University | Associate Professor

When not busy running her lab at CMU focused on federated learning and privacy-preserving ML, won an NSF CAREER Award and Sloan Research Fellowship and came in 1st place in the 2023 UK-US Privacy-Enhancing Technologies pandemic forecasting challenge

Notable Papers

Awards

  • NSF CAREER Award
  • Sloan Research Fellowship
  • 2023 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year
  • 2022 Intel Rising Star
  • MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35
  • 1st place in the 2023 UK-US Privacy-Enhancing Technologies pandemic forecasting challenge

If you're an alum and want to be added to this list or modify your information, please shoot Michael (mwornow@stanford.edu) an email or Slack message!

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