Akshay Krishnamurthy

Akshay Krishnamurthy is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research NYC. His research focuses on machine learning and statistics, particularly interactive learning frameworks, reinforcement learning, and generative AI. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.Sc. from UC Berkeley.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2015)
• B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, UC Berkeley (2010)

Research Interests:

His work emphasizes feedback-driven data collection in machine learning, including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, and their applications to language models and generative AI. Recent focus areas include sample-efficient exploration and decision-making under limited feedback.

Awards:

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2010)
• Best Student Paper Award at Asilomar Conference (2013)

Grants & Collaborations:

Active in interdisciplinary collaborations, including organizing workshops on foundations of post-training in generative AI. His research bridges theoretical guarantees with practical applications in reinforcement learning and decision-making systems.

Labs/Teams:

Leads research initiatives at Microsoft on generative AI, reinforcement learning, and scalable machine learning systems.