van der Schaar Lab congratulates Trent Kyono on graduation

The van der Schaar Lab is delighted to announce the graduation of Ph.D. student Trent Kyono.

Motivated by the desire to build cutting-edge machine learning models that can transform healthcare, Trent first joined the lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the supervision of Mihaela van der Schaar. Since then, he has pursued a research agenda at the confluence of machine learning, computer vision, and causality.

Much of his initial work focused on computer vision applications for mammography, including a triage method for reducing the workload for radiologists, for which he and his co-authors received a “Best of 2020” award from the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

More recently, he has focused on leveraging causal structure for improving machine learning, and has published several works at leading AI and machine learning conferences (including 2 at NeurIPS 2021) on topics including regularization, missing data imputation, and fair synthetic data generation.

Trent’s dissertation, entitled “Towards Causally-Aware Machine Learning” focuses on leveraging cause and effect relationships for improving several aspects of machine learning, such as regularization, missing data, synthetic data, and domain adaptation.

When I joined the lab, I was an engineer that knew how to build things – and rarely asked why. Now, though still an engineer at heart, I look at problems differently – with a deeper thirst (appreciation) for understanding “why”. This has made me a more successful engineer and researcher.

– Trent Kyono

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Trent is a senior machine learning researcher within the Ads Ranking Team at Meta (Facebook) where he works on machine learning methods for ad personalization. He is currently leading efforts on modeling user histories for personalization.

Mihaela van der Schaar and the lab’s researchers would like to wholeheartedly congratulate Trent on his graduation, thank him for his immeasurable contributions to the life and work of the lab, and wish him the very best of luck in his new role.

As one of the dominant forces driving progress in a burgeoning area, the van der Schaar Lab continues to grow its research team. Five Ph.D. students joined the lab in October 2021, a new postdoc started in April 2021, and the lab is currently recruiting for its 2022 intake.

To see a full list of our current research team members, click here. To inquire about PhD studentships, visit this page.