Alex GittensView profile
Assistant Professor
Alex Gittens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), joined in 2017. His research focuses on algorithmic trade-offs between computational efficiency and accuracy in large-scale linear algebra and machine learning contexts. He has expertise in kernel methods, randomized numerical linear algebra, and low-rank approximation techniques. Education: PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Caltech (2013) Industry Postdoc at eBay Research Labs (2013-2015) Postdoctoral Scholar at International Institute of Computer Science (2015-2016) His research explores scalable machine learning algorithms, nonlinear and multilinear sketching applications, and sampling for low-rank tensor/matrix approximation. Current technical interests include attention mechanisms for knowledge graph completion, federated learning trade-offs, and causal inference in adversarial settings. Recent publication trends show active contributions in federated learning (privacy-fairness optimization), causal information extraction (financial text analysis), and adversarial machine learning (robustness-security trade-offs). His work emphasizes trustworthy ML systems and computational efficiency in high-dimensional data processing. Teaching includes foundational discrete mathematics (CSCI 2200) and advanced machine learning courses (CSCI 6968/4968). He offers advising through Slack channels and via email, focusing on course selection, research opportunities, and graduate school preparation.
