Dr. Jacob Gardner

Biography

Jacob R. Gardner is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research spans practice theory and probabilistic machine learning. He is particularly interested in using techniques such as generative modeling and Bayesian optimization to solve challenging design and optimization problems in the natural sciences, including discovering new efficient antibiotics, vaccines, antibodies, and materials. Before joining the faculty, Gardner was a research scientist at Uber AI Labs and a postdoctoral associate in Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science. He has a diverse publication record in top-tier conferences such as Neural Information Processing Systems and the International Conference on Machine Learning, reflecting his commitment to advancing the field of machine learning through innovative methodologies. Gardner is also known for founding the GPyTorch project, which aims to implement Gaussian processes in a modular package with strong GPU acceleration. This project is deeply embedded within the PyTorch ecosystem, facilitating the design of complex models such as deep kernel learning and enabling efficient computational methods in modern numerical linear algebra.

Research Interests

Experience