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Mahdi Soltanolkotabi is the director of the center on AI Foundations for the Sciences (AIF4S) at the University of Southern California. He holds the Andrew Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair and focuses on developing the mathematical foundations of modern data science and artificial intelligence, characterizing behavior and pitfalls of contemporary non-convex learning optimization algorithms, and their applications in AI reliability and trustworthiness. His previous experience includes serving as a postdoctoral researcher in the EECS department at UC Berkeley after completing his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 2014. Soltanolkotabi's research encompasses various areas including mathematical foundations of data science, high-dimensional probability statistics, and AI safety and reliability, with a particular focus on multi-modal foundation models and their evaluations in healthcare and biomedical sciences. His expertise also extends to optimization, signal processing, and machine learning methods, as well as federated and continual learning techniques.
GRE is NOT required for Master's applicants for 2025-2026.