Aryan Mokhtari left Penn with his PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering in the Summer of 2017. The title of his dissertation is “Efficient Methods for Large-Scale Empirical Risk Minimization.” His favorite dissertation paper is “IQN: An Incremental Quasi-Newton Method with Local Superlinear Convergence Rate.”
Aryan is currently Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) where he is the Fellow of Texas Instruments/Kilby Professor. Before joining UT Austin, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT and a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute. He has received the NSF CAREER Award, the Google Research Scholar Award, the Army Research Office (ARO) Early Career Program Award, the Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship, UT Austin ECE Junior Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award, and Penn’s Joseph and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation. He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2011.
Aryan is husband of Solmaz and proud father of a yet-to-be-named future Penn student.
Mark Eisen is a Research Scientist in Intel Labs, Hillsboro, OR since August 2019. Dr. Eisen received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA in 2014. He has since obtained his Masters in the Department of Statistics from the Wharton School and his PhD in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. In the summer of 2013, he was a research intern at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at UMN and interned at Intel Labs during the summer of 2018. Dr. Eisen was awarded Outstanding Student Presentation at the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meeting, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Penn Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. His research interests include the use of stochastic optimization and machine learning in the design of wireless control systems.
Weiyu Huang is currently an Algorithms Engineer at Apple, developing and implementing algorithms using signal processing, machine learning, and careful data exploration. Weiyu was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania where he received Ph.D. degree in electrical and systems engineering and A.M. degree in statistics in 2018. From 2017 to March 2018, Weiyu was a data scientist at IQVIA, applying some of his Ph.D. research in graph signal processing and machine learning onto pharmaceutical and healthcare problems. Prior to that, Weiyu received B.Eng. (Honors) degree in Telecommunication and Electronics from the Australian National University, Australia in 2012. Weiyu was an policy officer and broadcasting engineer for The Australian Communication and Media Authority from 2011 to 2013, developing simulations and models to ensure the success of the switchover of analog to digital TV and the launch of 4G LTE in Australia.
Aryan Mokhtari is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), since January 2018. Before joining MIT, he was a Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, for the program on “Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization”, from August to December 2017. Prior to that, he was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) where he received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and systems engineering in 2014 and 2017, respectively, and his A.M. degree in statistics from the Wharton School in 2017. During his graduate study, he was a Research Intern with the Big-Data Machine Learning Group at Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, CA, USA, from June to August 2016. Dr. Mokhtari received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2011. His research interests include the areas of optimization, machine learning, and data science. His current research focuses on the theory and applications of convex and non-convex optimization in large-scale machine learning and data science problems. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including Penn’s Joseph and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation in electrical and systems engineering and the Simons-Berkeley Fellowship.
Alec Koppel is an AI Research Lead (Senior Scientist) at JP Morgan AI Research in the Multi-agent Learning and Simulation Group. From 2021-2022, he was Research Scientist at Amazon within Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT). From 2017-2021, he was a Research Scientist with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD). He completed his Master’s degree in Statistics and Doctorate in Electrical and Systems Engineering, both at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in August of 2017. Before coming to Penn, he completed his Master’s degree in Systems Science and Mathematics and Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics, both at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), Missouri. He is a recipient of the 2016 UPenn ESE Dept. Award for Exceptional Service, an awardee of the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship, a co-author of Best Paper Finalist at the 2017 IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, a finalist for the ARL Honorable Scientist Award 2019, an awardee of the 2020 ARL Director’s Research Award Translational Research Challenge (DIRA-TRC), a 2020 Honorable Mention from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and mentor to the 2021 ARL Summer Symposium Best Project Awardee. His academic work focuses on approximate Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, and decentralized optimization. He has worked on applications to robotics and autonomy; vendor selection and sourcing; and financial markets of various types.
Santiago Segarra left Penn with his PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering in the Summer of 2016. The title of his dissertation is “Metric Representations of Networks.” His favorite dissertation paper is “Network topology inference from spectral templates.”
Santiago is currently a W. M. Rice Trustee Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He was a postdoctoral research associate with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between the Fall 2016 and the Summer of 2018. He has received the 2011 Outstanding Graduate Award granted by the National Academy of Engineering of Argentina, the 2017 Penn’s Joseph and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Electrical and Systems Engineering, the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2021 Rice’s School of Engineering Research and Teaching Excellence Award, and early career awards from the NSF, the Army Research Office and Army Research Institute. He received his B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering with highest honors (Valedictorian) from the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), Argentina, in 2011.
Santiago is husband of Belen and proud father of Martina, Penn Class of 2046.
Ceyhun Eksin left Penn with his PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering in the Winter of 2015. The title of his dissertation is “Bayesian Network Games.” His favorite dissertation paper is “Bayesian Quadratic Network Game Filters.”
Ceyhun is currently associate professor and the Corrie and Jim Furber ’64 faculty fellow in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department in Texas A&M University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences between 2015 and 2017. He was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization in 2018. Ceyhun is a 2023 Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS) Career Initiation Fellow and a recipient of a 2023 NSF CAREER award. He received his B.Sc. degree in Control Engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 2005 and his M.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University in 2008, both in Istanbul, Turkey.
Ceyhun is husband of Defne and proud father of Lidia and Leyla, future Penn graduates of 2041 and 2044.