Meet the Faculty: Yanjun Han
This entree is a part of our Meet the Faculty blog series, which introduces and highlights faculty who have recently joined CDS
Meet CDS Faculty Yanjun Han, who will join CDS this fall as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Data Science. Yanjun is a Norbert Wiener postdoctoral associate at the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC) at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), mentored by Philippe Rigollet and Sasha Rakhlin. Prior to his work at MIT, he was a Simons research fellow with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I am excited to join CDS to work on the mathematics of data science, ranging from statistics, machine learning, sequential decision making, and the theory of information,” said Yanjun. “I’d love to collaborate with researchers and practitioners from relevant areas to make both theoretical and practical impact.”
Yanjun received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in Aug 2021, under Tsachy Weissman, and his BE in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. One of Yanjun’s current research interests lies in the statistical complexity of interactive decision making, with recent publications including “Statistical Complexity and Optimal Algorithms for Non-linear Ridge Bandits” (Feb 2023) and “Tight Guarantees for Interactive Decision Making with the Decision-Estimation Coefficient” (Jan 2023).
Some of his selective work includes “Optimal rates of entropy estimation over Lipschitz balls” which was featured in the AoS Special Invited Session at JSM 2021, “On the Competitive Analysis and High Accuracy Optimality of Profile Maximum Likelihood” which resolved a long-standing open problem for an MLE based on profiles, and “Optimal No-regret Learning in Repeated First-price Auctions” on bidding in first-price auctions.
To view all our current faculty, please visit the CDS Faculty page on our website.
By Meryl Phair
