Sivaraman Balakrishnan

Sivaraman Balakrishnan is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University with joint appointments in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and the Machine Learning Department. His research bridges statistical machine learning, algorithmic statistics, and robust inference.

• Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (Language Technologies Institute, advised by Jaime Carbonell); postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley (Department of Statistics, advised by Martin Wainwright and Bin Yu).

Research Interests: Spanning robust statistics, domain adaptation, minimax hypothesis testing, assumption-light inference, causal inference, statistical optimal transport, non-parametric statistics, ranking, crowdsourcing, optimization, and topological data analysis.

Key Research Trends: Recent work focuses on domain adaptation under label/misingness shifts, robust gradient estimation, smooth optimal transport maps, and conditional independence testing. He explores minimax optimal methods, univariate mean estimation, and high-dimensional regression with missing data.

Scientific Awards:

• IMS Lawrence D. Brown Student Award (2021, 2020)
• NVIDIA Pioneer Award (2018)
• Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Best Paper Award (2018)

Grants and Editorial Roles: NSF grants (CCF-1763734, DMS-1713003, DMS-2113684, DMS-2310632), Amazon Research Award (2021), Google Research Scholar Award (2021). Associate Editor for JASA and JRSSB; Editorial Board member for Foundations and Trends in Statistics.

Collaborative Groups: Co-organizes the Statistics and Machine Learning Reading Group and participates in the Causal Inference Working Group at CMU.