Junier Oliva

Junier Oliva is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Lead Faculty of the Master of Applied Data Science program. His research focuses on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and nonparametric statistics, particularly in high-dimensional density estimation, sequential modeling, and learning from complex/structured data. He holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with prior industry experience at Yahoo! and Uber ATG.

Research Interests: Machine learning, artificial intelligence, nonparametric statistics, deep learning, statistical data mining, signal processing, kernel methods, and scalability. His work bridges machine and human learning via collective approaches, emphasizing simple yet flexible models for massive datasets.

Awards/Grants:

• $592K AIM-AHEAD/NIH Grant for Human+AI Collaboration
• $594K NSF Grant for Scientific Discovery
• $500K NSF Grant for 'Machine Detectives' Project
• ACM BCB Best Paper Award (2022) for transparent single-cell classification work

Labs/Teams: Director of the LUPA Lab, which develops machine learning techniques for holistic data understanding across domains like healthcare, earth science, and computer vision.