About me

I am a final-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California, advised by my amazing collaborators, Aram Galstyan and Greg Ver Steeg.

I am passionate about different aspects of Computer Science, including, Machine Learning, Graphs, their intersection, Algorithms, Software Architectures, Distributed Systems, Mathematics (esp. Calculus and Linear Algebra), Programming Languages, Computer Security, and others. I am also passionate about teaching.

Ph.D.

Although I’ve collaborated on a number of projects during my Ph.D., the primary focus of my dissertation is on the efficiency of machine learning models over graph-structured data, where I view efficiency from angles of:

• Data Efficiency: Learning with fewer labeled examples.
• Algorithmic Efficiency: Faster training of graph neural networks.
• Human Efficiency: Less hyperparameters for fewer experiments. E.g., replace hyperparameters with trainable ones.
• Efficient Scale: Extend learning algorithms to handle large graphs (larger than main memory of a single machine)

Resume

My full resume is online: http://sami.haija.org/resume.pdf