blake (dot) woodworth (at) gwu (dot) edu
I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at George Washington University since August 2023. The primary focus of my research is on the theory of optimization, with a particular emphasis on precisely understanding convex, non-convex, and distributed optimization algorithms. I have also been very interested in efforts to understand modern, highly overparametrized machine learning models through the lens of implicit regularization. During my PhD, I also had the opportunity to work on fairness in ML and on adaptive data analysis.
From October 2021-June 2023, I was a postdoctoral researcher with the SIERRA team at Inria, working with Francis Bach, and before that, I was a PhD student in computer science at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) advised by Nati Srebro until I graduated in Summer 2021. Before TTIC, I studied at Yale University where I received a B.S. in computer science, advised by Dan Spielman. At Yale, my coursework was spread evenly across the computer science, mathematics, and statistics departments; I was also a peer tutor for several programming-intensive computer science courses.
From September 2017-July 2019 I was supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and from July 2019-August 2021, I was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship in machine learning.
Last Updated: March 31, 2023