Ameet Soni

Ameet Soni is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Swarthmore College, currently on leave (2021–2024) serving as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Diversity, Recruitment, and Retention. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin (2011), where he was advised by Professor Jude Shavlik. His research integrates machine learning with computational biology and medicine, focusing on probabilistic graphical models, deep learning, and applications in genomics, medical diagnosis, and biomedical data analysis.

His core research interests span:

• Machine Learning: Probabilistic inference, statistical relational learning, and deep neural networks.
• Biomedical Applications: Protein-structure prediction, gene modeling, Alzheimer's/Parkinson's diagnosis, and biomedical text/image analysis.

His publications emphasize machine learning applications in bioinformatics and medicine, with trends including deep learning for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis (e.g., Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s), ethical AI education, protein-structure determination, and biomedical data mining. Recent work (2020) also explores AI ethics pedagogy.

Awards:

• Best Paper Award, ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2010)

Advising & Labs: He has supervised 25+ students (22 alumni, 3 current) in machine learning and computational biology projects. Alumni pursue careers in academia (e.g., Michigan State University), industry (Google, Amazon), and medicine. His lab investigates transcription factor binding, brain MRI analysis for Alzheimer’s, and statistical relational learning.