I'm an engineering research associate in the Poldrack Lab at Stanford University and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research interests are in the development and analysis of statistical machine learning techniques motivated by, and applied to various modern big data problems. I am particularly interested in the analysis of large scale neuroimaging and genetics data. My CV is available here.

I will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2016. I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a PhD in Electrical Engineering advised by Joydeep Ghosh. My postdoctoral research is primarily with Russell A. Poldrack and Pradeep Ravikumar.

News:

• Invited talk at @ Gatsby Unit, UCL (abstract, slides) (July, 2016) -- also @ TTI-Chicago (June, 2016), University of Amsterdam (July, 2016).
• Tutorial on time-varying dynamic brain connectivity @ PRNI 2016 (slides) (July. 2016).
• Invited talk at Information Theory and Applications Workshop (Feb. 2016).
• I co-organized Stamlins @ ICML 2015 with Bertrand Thirion and Lars Kai Hansen.
• I was a program chair for the 5th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging.
• Invited talk at Neuroimaging meta-analysis methods workshop @ Neurospin, INRIA (Apr. 2015).
• Invited talk at Information Theory and Applications Workshop (Feb. 2015).
• Invited talk at UNC Biostatistics (Oct. 2014).
• Visit and talk at Parietal team, INRIA (Sep. 2014).
• Moved to Stanford! (Aug. 2014).
• I co-organized the workshop on Divergence Methods for Probabilistic Inference (DMPI) at ICML 2014 with Jun Zhu, Mark Reid and Eric Xing (June 2014).
• OHBM Trainee Award for "Exploratory Analysis of Imaging and Behavioral Phenotypes with Sparse CCA" (Mar. 2014).
• UAI student paper award for "Constrained Bayesian Inference for Low Rank Multitask Learning" (July 2013).
• Co-chair of the AAAI 2010 Symposium on Manifold Learning and its Applications with Richard Souvenir (Nov. 2010).
• Qualcomm "Q" award of Excellence (pdf) (2006, 2007).
• Outstanding NJIT NCE/ECE student award (2005).

Contact: sanmi[AT]illinois[DOT]edu