About me
Hello, my name is Negar. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from KTH and at the moment I am a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University Department of Computer Science. Previously I was a researcher at RIKEN and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research.
Research Interests
I am interested in probabilistic machine learning and its application to biology and deep learning theory.
Some examples of research questions that interests me:
- How can we build tools to extract biologically meaningful embeddings?
- How can we augment biologically relevant signals when performing approximate Bayesian inference?
- What happens theoretically in the inference framework when posterior collapse occurs and how can we push away this event?
Publications
The latest article, VaiPhy presented at NeurIPS 2022, proposes a novel variational inference for phylogenetic inference (task of tree reconstruction of the historical biological events); VaiPhy outperforms the state-of-art phylogenetic inference methods with respect to wall-clock runtime.