I direct the Artificial Intelligence and Systems Laboratory (AISys). AISys is located at 2212 and 1211 in Storey Innovation Center.

AISys in one slide.

The AISys lab welcomes people of any race, religion, national origin, gender identity, family commitments, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and eligible age or ability.

We investigate a variety of open problems that sit at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer systems. We develop novel algorithmic and theoretically principled methods that are grounded in mathematics for systems problems with the ultimate goal of building reliable and high-performance machine learning systems. On the application side, we aim to develop the next generation of autonomous systems (on-device, embedded, heterogeneous, cloud, robotics) that can perceive, reason, and react to complex real-world environments and users with high levels of precision and efficiency. Overall, we aim to conduct cutting-edge and high-impact research through full-stack approaches that encourage lab members with skills in algorithms, systems, and math to solve critical and practical challenges at the intersection of AI+Systems.

Core Values

• Fruitful collaborations and constant learning matter a lot to all of us.
• We combine theoretical and empirical insights to build intelligent autonomous systems.
• We start by hypothesis, we design experiments, and use theory to understand the empirical observations.
• Understanding the causal mechanisms and governing dynamics of machine learning systems inspires us.
• Scientific rigor is a principal value.
• We all love what we do, proud of what we bring into the world, and how we build it.
• We love to give and receive regular feedback, this helps us to constantly learn and improve our outcomes.
• Everyone is of equal value. Fairness and equality matter to us a lot.
• Our diversity is important and will be an ongoing goal.
• Transparency and open access to scientific outcomes is key to make progress, we release all code+data.
• Our lab is open to all people of any beliefs and ideas.
• We are weird in one way or another, but we do respect math!
• Reproducible science is what we care the most.
• All above values start with respect to science, colleagues, lab members, and all people.
• We also have lots of fun times, checkout our group photos over time, before and after the pandemic!

For prospective AISys members

• Are you a current Ph.D. student at UofSC interested in working with me? The door of my office is always open and I love discussing research with students, please stop by and let’s chat about your interests.

• Are you a prospective Ph.D. student interested in working with me? I am always looking for highly-motivated students to join our AISys Lab at UofSC. Please drop me an email and share your interests (reading some of our recent publications would help a lot to get an idea of what kind of research we have been doing). If you already have published at top-tier Systems, ML, or Software Engineering conferences, the chances for you to be admitted here are high. If not, don’t worry, there would be chances for everyone, but you need to show me some evidence of high motivation. I strongly recommend to put one of the previous work that you are proud of on GitHub and share details with me. This can be in a form of an industrial project, a research project, a replication of the result of a good paper in your area, a replication of one of our recent papers, or even better a contribution to an open-source project. Apply to the CS Ph.D. program at UofSC.

  • If you are a US citizen or a permanent resident of the US there are some opportunities that you may consider applying and I am happy to work with you on these to secure a grant: e.g., NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP), and The DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

• Are you a UofSC undergraduate student interested in working with me on research? Please email me your resume and a description of why you want to get involved. You have a very good chance if: you have contributed to a project in the past (e.g., via prior experience, or even some personal projects); You have a strong background in computer science and programming (and ideally good in math); You can commit 15+ hours/week.

Current Members

Sonam Kharde postdoc 2022 - present

Sonam is a postdoc interested in control and optimization of (uncertain) systems.

Mohammad Ali Javidian postdoc 2018 - present

Mohammad Ali is a part-time postdoc interested in causal AI and transfer learning.

Mehdi Yaghouti postdoc 2022 - present

Mehdi Yaghouti is a postdoc interested in theoretical foundations of machine learning.

Ying Meng phd 2019 - present

Ying is a PhD student in computer science. She is interested in security of machine learning and software testing.

Fatemeh Ghofrani phd 2021 - present

Fatemeh is a PhD student in computer science. She is interested in causal representation learning and explainability.

Nasrin Imanpour phd 2022 - present

Nasrin is doing her second PhD in computer science. She is interested in ML for systems.

Hamed Damirchi phd 2022 - present

Hamed is a PhD student in computer science, interested in representation learning and robotics.

Md Abir Hossen phd 2021 - present

Abir is a PhD student in computer science. He is interested in autonomous systems and robot learning.

Kimia Noorbakhsh undergrad 2020 - present

Kimia is undergraduate student in Computer Engineering and Math (Sharif University). She is interested in theoretical AI/ML and symbolic mathematics.

Jianhai Su phd 2018 - present

Jianhai is a PhD student in computer science. He is interested in transfer learning, autonomic computing, and reinforcement learning.

Md Shahriar Iqbal phd 2018 - present

Shahriar is a PhD student in computer science. He is interested in ML for Systems.

Former Members

Shuge Lei phd 2020 - 2021

Shuge is PhD student in computer science. She is interested in applied machine learning.

Peter Mourfield msc 2019 - 2020

Peter is a PhD student in computer science. He is interested in autonomic systems and reinforcement learning.

Cody Shearer undergrad 2020 - 2021

Cody is an undergraduate student in computer science and math. He is interested in causal AI and transfer learning for systems performance.

Blake Edwards undergrad 2019 - 2020

Blake is a honors college undergraduate student in computer science and math. He is interested in deep neural network model compression and distillation.

Stephen Baione undergrad 2019 - 2020

Stephen is a honors college undergraduate student in computer science and math. He is interested in deep neural network model compression and distillation.