Dr. Samory Kpotufe

Biography

Samory Kpotufe is a professor of statistics at the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. He graduated in 2010 with a degree in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego, where he was advised by Sanjoy Dasgupta. After graduation, Kpotufe conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in the department headed by Bernhard Schoelkopf and within the learning theory group of Ulrike von Luxburg. He also served as an Assistant Research Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago and spent four years as an Assistant Professor in the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) department at Princeton University. Kpotufe's research focuses on machine learning, particularly emphasizing nonparametric methods in high-dimensional statistics. His main interests lie in understanding the inherent difficulty of high-dimensional problems and the practical constraints in real-world applications. He aims to design adaptive procedures that can self-tune to unknown structures in data, addressing challenges such as manifold learning, sparsity, and clustering while considering constraints like time and labeling costs in modern applications.

Research Interests