Prof. Dr. Rachel Ward

Profile

Academic positionFull Professor
Research fieldsMathematics in computer science,Numerical analysis,Operations research, mathematical programming
KeywordsDimension Reduction, Randomized Algorithms, Mathematics in Data Science, Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning, Stochastic Gradient Descent

Current contact address

CountryUnited States of America
CityAustin
InstitutionUniversity of Texas at Austin
InstituteDepartment of Mathematics

Host during sponsorship

Prof. Dr. Felix KrahmerFakultät für Mathematik, Technische Universität München, Garching
Start of initial sponsorship19/12/2024

Programme(s)

2023Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award Programme

Nominator's project description

Professor Ward is well known internationally for her seminal contributions to the mathematical foundations of machine learning and data science. She recently generated a significant impact with her theoretical results explaining why stochastic gradient descent approaches are such a powerful tool for training deep neural networks. During her stay in Germany, she intends to advance the mathematical theory of the method of sparse Fourier features, a machine learning approach that she recently proposed for the small data regime.