Ara Vartanian


PhD Candidate
Department of Computer Sciences

email: first name and first four letters of my last name no spaces nor punctuation nor nuthin at cs dot wisc dot edu

Is the above obfuscation a bit much? Okay, it's aravart. Show me what your crawler's got!


About Me

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, working with advisor Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu. My research focuses on interactive machine learning (iML), which is machine learning with a human-in-the-loop. In traditional machine learning, a human provides input to a learning system only through labeling examples.

iML explores the improved learning outcomes possible when there is a richer interface between human and computational agent. Sometimes, for example, we don't have a lot of data at our disposal, but a human can efficiently guide a learner through a small number of specially constructed examples. Conversely, sometimes a computational system can aid a human in quickly synthesizing a large number of training examples for then training a computational learner.

From a theoretical standpoint, my research frames interactive machine learning within the context of machine teaching and active learning, touching on ideas and methods in reinforcement learning and optimal control theory. Since adversarial attacks are the flip side of machine teaching, I’ve also done work in adversarial learning. Along the way, I’ve worked on applications in NLP, program synthesis, and topological data analysis.

Publications