Degrees

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
  Princeton University, 2007-2012
• B.E. in Electrical Engineering
  Tsinghua University, 2003-2007

Academic Awards

• C.E.Procter Fellowship, Princeton Univ., 2011-2012
  A prestigious fellowship awarded to final-year Ph.D. students to recognize outstanding performance during graduate school.
• Distinguished Graduate, Tsinghua Univ., 2007
  Awarded to students graduating with the highest distinction. I also graduated with the highest GPA in my class (1st out of 164).
• Gold Medal, International Math Olympiad, 2003
  Ranked 12th among more than 400 high school students from around the world.

PhD Research Overview

For my PhD research at Princeton, I focused on solving a few key problems in machine learning. More specifically, I was very interested in how to represent the high-dimensional real world data (for example, images) in a way that is conducive to learning and inference.

During that time, the machine learning community is starting to explore the idea of using sparse dictionaries to represent complex data. I have engineered a framework to learn hierarchical, tree-structured dictionaries. I also made important mathematical contributions on solving the lasso problem, a key component in dictionary learning. For more details on this research, please refer to the following two key papers that I published:

• Learning Sparse Representations of High Dimensional Data on Large Scale Dictionaries; Xiang, Xu, Ramadge; NeurIPS 2011, link to pdf
• Screening Test for Lasso Problems; Xiang, Wang, Ramadge; IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, link to pdf