Aishwarya H. Balwani

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PhD candidate, School of ECE, GaTech

Email: abalwani6@gatech.edu
Curriculum Vitae

About Me

I am a PhD candidate in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, largely interested in characterizing learning and intelligence in artificial and biological systems. Towards these ends, I spend my time studying both machine learning and theoretical + computational neuroscience, with a healthy smattering of many topics in applied mathematics. I am primarily advised by Dr. Hannah Choi and co-advised by Dr. Chris Rozell.

Ongoing Research

Much of my proposed work revolves around and studies different aspects of representation learning with an eye towards explaining complex, hierarchical information processing systems. In particular I look to leverage the geometric structure of representations found in both artificial & biological neural networks so as to render them more interpretable, and thereby discover their governing principles. Some ideas that I actively think about in these contexts are:

My long-term goals of understanding learning + intelligence combined with my facility for math & engineering have led to the following (somewhat) shorter-term goals that I try to actively contribute to with my research:

Recent-ish News

Interests & Hobbies

Machine Learning: Unsupervised/self-supervised learning, dimensionality reduction & manifold learning, metric/similarity learning, and learning with structured sparsity.
Mathematics: Matrix & tensor decompositions, column subset selection, low-rank approximation, metric embeddings, convex geometry, optimization, group & representation theory, differential geometry & topology, and information geometry.
Neuroscience: Neural (i.e., population and sparse) coding, predictive coding, synaptic plasticity & learning rules, models of brain structure & organization, and connectomics.

Outside of academic and scientific pursuits, my hobbies include reading 📖, listening to + studying classical music 🎼, watching + playing racquet sports 🎾, trying (and often failing) to keep up with cool movies + TV shows 🎥, and solving every Rubik’s cube variant 🎲 I can get my hands on.

I am incredibly fond of cats 🐈, enjoy history of almost any kind 📜, still identify as an ardent Federer fan 💜, and remain a Bombay kid 🌏🏠👶 at heart for life. 🌈.

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