Adam Tauman Kalai

About

I have been researching away at Microsoft Research New England (Cambridge, MA) since its founding in 2008 on various fun problems including Safe Artificial Intelligence, Code Generation (getting computers to write programs), and Algorithms. Previously, I served as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and TTI-Chicago.

To see what I’ve been up to recently, watch a video of my work on Language Models presented at TTI-Chicago in March.

I’ve chaired and co-chaired a number of conferences and meetings including NEML (New England Machine Learning Day), HCOMP 2017 (Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing), and COLT 2010 (Conference on Learning Theory).

Short Biography

Adam Tauman Kalai is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. His research includes work on artificial intelligence and algorithms, with a focus on code generation and the responsible use of Language Models.  He received his BA from Harvard and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. He has served as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He is a member of the science team of Project CETI, an interdisciplinary initiative to understand the communication of sperm whales. He has co-chaired AI and crowdsourcing conferences including the COLT (the Conference on Learning Theory), the HCOMP (the Conference on Human Computation) and NEML. His honors include the Majulook prize, multiple best paper awards, an NSF CAREER award, and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship.

Students & Teaching

Previous students/interns: Jake Abernethy (Berkeley→Georgia Tech), Gati Aher (Olin College), Daniel Alabi (Harvard), Ken Arnold (Harvard), Maria De-Arteaga (CMU→UT Austin), Pranjal Awasthi (CMU→Rutgers), Nina Balcan (CMU→CMU), Harry Bovik (CMU→CMU), Matthew Bowers (MIT), Danielle Bragg (UW→MSR), Elisa Celis (UW→Yale), Myra Cheng (Caltech→Stanford), Konstantina Christakopoulou (UMN→Google), Brittany Fiore-Gartland (UW→UW),  Abie Flaxman (CMU→UW), Tom Heffernan (Shrewsbury HS→Colorado College), Varun Kanade (Georgia Tech→Oxford), Ashwin Kalyan (Georgia Tech→Allen AI), Linyi Li (UIUC), Katrina Ligett (CMU→Caltech), Azarakhsh Malekian (UMD→Toronto), Brendan McMahan (CMU→Google), Aditya Menon (UCSD→Google), Ankur Moitra (MIT→MIT), Claire Monteleoni (MIT→Colorado), Peter Organisciak (UIUC→Denver),  Alexey Romanov (UMASS Lowell→Microsoft), Aaron Roth (CMU→UPenn), Tal Schuster (MIT→Google), Nathaniel Swinger (Lexington HS→UW), Omer Tamuz (Weizmann→Caltech), Jason Tsay (CMU→IBM), Shubham Tulsiani (IIT→CMU), Duru Turkoglu (U. Chicago→DePaul), Shyam Upadhyay (UIUC→Google), Greg Valiant (Berkeley→Stanford), Sofia Vempala (Midtown HS), Elad Verbin (Tel Aviv University→Lunar), Ellen Vitercik (CMU→Stanford), Allison Wang (Mission San Jose HS), Shih-Yu Wang (MIT), Miaomiao Wen (CMU→Coursera), Gabriel Wickline, and Kuat Yessenov (MIT→Google).

Spring 2008: Game Theory and Computer Science, (Georgia Tech)

Fall 2006: Machine Learning Theory (Weizmann Institute)

Autumn 2004: Online Algorithms (University of Chicago)

I’m also co-founder of majulook.

You can contact me at (the middle four letters of macadamias) @kal.ai

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