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:

  1. How can we build tools to extract biologically meaningful embeddings?
  2. How can we augment biologically relevant signals when performing approximate Bayesian inference?
  3. 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.

Papers