Engineering

LIN F. YANG

Dr. Lin Yang (杨林) is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on developing and applying fast algorithms for machine learning and data science. He is keen on understanding the fundamental theory and computation limits of optimization for different machine learning problems. His current research focus is on reinforcement learning theory and applications, learning for control, non-convex optimization, and streaming algorithms. He was a recipient of the Simons' Research Fellowship, Dean Robert H. Roy Fellowship, and JHU MINDS best dissertation award.

Previously, he was a postdoc at Princeton University working with Prof. Mengdi Wang. He obtained two Ph.D. degrees (in Computer Science and in Physics & Astronomy) from Johns Hopkins University. His doctoral advisors are Professor Alex Szalay and Professor Vova Braverman.

[Last Updated Sept. 2022]

Latest News

  • 3 papers accepted to NeurIPS 2022. Congrats to Osama Hanna, Dingwen Kong & Sharan Vaswani.
  • 1 paper accepted to ICML 2022. Congrats to Weichao Mao
  • 1 paper accepted to ICLR 2022 (as spotlight presentation). Congrats to Xiaoyu Chen, Jiachen Hu.
  • 2 papers accepted to AISTATAS 2022. Congrats to collaborators.
  • 1 paper accepted to FOCS 2021. Congrats to Ruosong Wang.
  • 3 papers accepted to NeruIPS 2021. Congrats to collaborators.
  • Fei Feng graduated, and joins Pintrests! Congrats Fei!
  • Visiting Deepmind @ summer 2021.

Publications

Teaching

Service

  • Area Chair: ICLR (2021), NeurIPS (2021), NeurIPS (2022), ICLR (2022), ICLR (2023), AISTATS (2023)
  • Senior Program Committee: AAAI (2021)
  • Program Committee: ACML (2019), AAAI (2020)
  • Conference Reviewing: AAAI, ICML, NeurIPS, STOC, FOCS, COLT, PODS, ITCS, ACML, AISTATS, ICALP, RANDOM, ESA, LATIN, KAIS, FSTTCS
  • Journal Reviewing: Theoretical Computer Science, QIC, JCSS, OPRE

People

Ph.D. Students Undergraduate Students Alumni Collaborators (alphabetical order)
Talks

Education

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, Advisors: Vladimir Braverman, Alex Szalay
  • Ph.D. in Physics & Astronomy, Advisor: Alex Szalay
  • MS.E. in Computer Science (GPA 4.0/4.0)
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
  • B.S. in Math & Physics with High Honors

Contact Me

Email: linyang[at]ee[dot]ucla[dot]edu

My middle name Forrest is a translation of my first name (林). My publication name is Lin F. Yang -- to distinguish me from many Lin Yang's. Note that my official name (Lin Yang OR 杨林) does not contain a middle name.