Berkan Ottlik

Professionally, I am a senior undergraduate student at Columbia University studying CS and applied math. I am mainly interested in neural network theory and theories of deep learning. I also like CS theory, machine learning for agriculture, and data visualization.

For fun, I garden with the Columbia Gardening Club, I play water polo, I listen to The Beatles, and I have good time with my girlfriend, family, and friends.

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 was lucky to be mainly advised by Berfin Şimşek and helped by Denny Wu.
• Undergraduate research assistant at Columbia. Worked on understanding Transformers and optimization of the logistic loss under a spherical constraint. I was 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.