Long Nguyen

I am broadly interested in statistical inference, which is informally defined as the process of turning data into prediction and understanding. I like to work with richly structured data, such as those extracted from texts, images and other spatiotemporal signals. In recent years I have gravitated toward a field in statistics known as Bayesian nonparametrics, which provides a fertile and powerful mathematical framework for the development of many computational and statistical modeling ideas. My motivation for all this came originally from an early interest in machine learning, which continues to be a major source of research interest. A primary focus of my group’s research in machine learning to develop more effective inference algorithms using stochastic, variational and geometric viewpoints.