Dr. Sham Kakade

Biography

Sham M. Kakade is the Co-director of the Kempner Institute and serves as the Rampell Family Professor at Harvard University. His research focuses on advancing the fundamental capabilities necessary to develop artificial general intelligence and creating systems that interact effectively while adding value to the real world. Current research interests include developing full-stack training pipelines for foundation models with a particular focus on distributed systems architecture, scalable optimization algorithms, and principled approaches to data curation and composition. He investigates the mathematical and scientific principles governing large-scale learning systems, emphasizing the understanding of emergent capabilities, scaling laws, and the fundamental limits of neural architectures. Additionally, he is advancing autonomous agent architectures that reason, plan, and learn in interaction with complex environments, bridging the gap between language models and embodied intelligence. Dr. Kakade actively seeks students from diverse backgrounds with experience in applied deep learning and strong foundations in optimization, mathematics, and theoretical computer science. He co-directs the newly established Kempner Institute, which offers substantial computational resources for cutting-edge research in these fields.

Research Interests

Experience