Ameet Talwalkar

Associate Professor, Machine Learning Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Ameet Talwalkar's work is motivated by the goal of democratizing machine learning.

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Carnegie Mellon University

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Biography

Ameet Talwalkar is an assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, and also co-founder and chief scientist at Determined AI. He led the initial development of the MLlib project in Apache Spark, is a co-author of the textbook Foundations of Machine Learning (MIT Press), and created an award-winning edX MOOC on distributed machine learning.

Areas of Expertise

Machine Learning
Algorithms
Computational Biology
Bioinformatics
Data Mining

Media Appearances

Pittsburgh’s AI-Powered Renaissance

CMU News  online

2024-10-09

"CMU has an unparalleled degree of expertise in AI among its faculty and students. In the context of human-centric AI, the fact that we have distinct departments in machine learning, human-computer interaction, and language technologies, coupled with a highly collaborative research environment, gives CMU and Pittsburgh a technical advantage. We have a burgeoning startup scene, in part based on academic spinouts, including two of the fastest growing AI startups in the world: Abridge AI and Skild AI."

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Researchers outline promises, challenges of understanding AI for biological discovery

Medical Xpress  online

2024-08-09

"Interpretable machine learning has generated significant excitement as machine learning and artificial intelligence tools are being applied to increasingly important problems," said Ameet Talwalkar, an associate professor in CMU's Machine Learning Department (MLD).

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Determined AI makes its machine learning infrastructure free and open source

TechCrunch  online

2020-04-29

“They’re using things like TensorFlow and PyTorch,” said Chief Scientist Ameet Talwalkar. “A lot of the way that work is done is just conventions: How do the models get trained? Where do I write down the data on which is best? How do I transform data to a good format? All these are bread and butter tasks. There’s tech to do it, but it’s really the Wild West. And the amount of work you have to do to get it set up… there’s a reason big tech companies build out these internal infrastructures.”

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Spotlight

1 min

Pittsburgh’s AI-Powered Renaissance

Carnegie Mellon University’s artificial intelligence experts come from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives, representing fields including computer science, sustainability, national security and entrepreneurship. Ahead of the AI Horizons Summit highlighting the city's commitment to responsible technology, CMU experts weighed in on why they see Pittsburgh as a hub for human-centered AI.

Ameet TalwalkarZico KolterValerie KarplusIra MoskowitzMichael MattarockMeredith Grelli

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Accomplishments

Best Paper Award, Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP)

2023

Okawa Foundation Research Grant

2018

Google Faculty Research Award

2015

Education

New York University

Ph.D.

Computer Science - Machine Learning

2010

Event Appearances

Speaker: AI in Financial Services: Transforming the Sector for a Better World

AI Horizons Pittsburgh Summit  Pittsburgh, PA

2024-10-14

Articles

The Impact of Element Ordering on LM Agent Performance

arXiv preprint

2024

There has been a surge of interest in language model agents that can navigate virtual environments such as the web or desktop. To navigate such environments, agents benefit from information on the various elements (e.g., buttons, text, or images) present. It remains unclear which element attributes have the greatest impact on agent performance, especially in environments that only provide a graphical representation (i.e., pixels). Here we find that the ordering in which elements are presented to the language model is surprisingly impactful--randomizing element ordering in a webpage degrades agent performance comparably to removing all visible text from an agent's state representation.

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Do llms exhibit human-like response biases? a case study in survey design

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2024

One widely cited barrier to the adoption of LLMs as proxies for humans in subjective tasks is their sensitivity to prompt wording—but interestingly, humans also display sensitivities to instruction changes in the form of response biases. We investigate the extent to which LLMs reflect human response biases, if at all. We look to survey design, where human response biases caused by changes in the wordings of “prompts” have been extensively explored in social psychology literature. Drawing from these works, we design a dataset and framework to evaluate whether LLMs exhibit human-like response biases in survey questionnaires

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Applying interpretable machine learning in computational biology—pitfalls, recommendations and opportunities for new developments

Nature Methods

2024

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled the development of next-generation predictive models for complex computational biology problems, thereby spurring the use of interpretable machine learning (IML) to unveil biological insights. However, guidelines for using IML in computational biology are generally underdeveloped. We provide an overview of IML methods and evaluation techniques and discuss common pitfalls encountered when applying IML methods to computational biology problems. We also highlight open questions, especially in the era of large language models, and call for collaboration between IML and computational biology researchers.

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