Berkan

By day, I am a senior undergraduate student at Columbia University studying CS and math. I am broadly interested in algorithmic statistics, algorithms for massive data, machine learning theory, and applications of machine learning.

By night, I garden with the Columbia Gardening Club, I plant and maintain tree beds, I play water polo, I listen to The Beatles, and I have a good time.

Short Background

• Summer Research Assistant at the Center for Computational Math at the Flatiron Institute. Working on gradient flow dynamics of teacher-student distillation with the squared loss. I am lucky to be advised by Berfin Şimşek.
• Undergraduate research assistant at Columbia. Working on understanding Transformers and optimization of the logistic loss under a spherical constraint. I am lucky to be advised by Daniel Hsu.
• Head teaching assistant for Analysis of Algorithms (2 times) at Columbia.
• Teaching assistant for Machine Learning (4 times) at Columbia.
• Software engineering intern at State Farm.
• Full stack / machine learning intern at NimbleThis and Senslytics in Atlanta.