Yifan Sun

Yifan Sun
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Interests

Optimization, machine learning and its applications in data science and scientific computing.

Biography

Yifan Sun earned her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015, with focus on optimization. She got her MS in Electrical Engineering from the same institution in 2011, and her BS in Electrical/Computer Engineering from F. W. Olin College of Engineering in 2010.

Research

Yifan Sun’s research is in characterizing and improving optimization methods for today’s computing challenges. Her focus is on machine learning, where the recent explosion of new and exciting complex data and tasks has brought light to many optimization themes, from using fast approximate methods to fitting complex models (like deep neural nets) to learning low-dimensional vector representations. The main goal is to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Past topics have included improved complexity analysis of sparse optimization, better screening techniques for feature selection, decomposition methods for large-scale optimization, regularization via gauges, robust distributed optimization, etc.