Meet the Fellow: Denny Wu
This entree is a part of our Meet the Fellow blog series, which introduces and highlights Faculty Fellows who have recently joined CDS.
Meet Denny Wu, who will join CDS as a faculty fellow this fall. Currently a PhD student in computer science at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Denny works under the supervision of University of Toronto Assistant Professors Jimmy Ba and Murat A. Erdogdu. His research focuses on developing a theoretical understanding of current machine learning systems, especially neural networks, using tools from high-dimensional statistics.
Prior to his PhD work, Denny pursued his undergraduate degree in Computational Biology from Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked as an undergraduate research assistant advised by Ruslan Salakhutdinov. A frequent visitor to Tokyo, Japan, Denny works with Taiji Suzuki at the University of Tokyo and the Deep Learning Theory Team at RIKEN AIP. He has gained additional research experience at Microsoft Deep Learning Group with Greg Yang and has been honored with the Borealis AI Fellowship, awarded to students pursuing outstanding AI research in Canada, along with being recognized among the 2023 UChicago Rising Stars in Data Science.
“I am thrilled to be part of the vibrant and diverse research community at NYU CDS, where I hope to contribute to our understanding of the universe and two-layer neural networks,” said Denny. His recent studies aim to characterize the optimization and generalization performance of neural networks in the presence of representation (feature) learning, such as “High-dimensional asymptotics of feature learning: how one gradient step improves the representation” (NeurIPS 2022), and “Convex analysis of the mean-field Langevin dynamics” (AISTATS 2022).
Denny’s research is published in international machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and AISTATS. His work has also appeared in prominent journals such as the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment and Nature Protocols.
To view all our current faculty fellows, please visit the CDS Faculty Fellow page on our website.
By Meryl Phair
