People

Principal Investigator

Professor Ankur Mali

Professor Ankur Mali received his Ph.D. in 2022 from The Pennsylvania State University, where he worked under the supervision of Professor Clyde Lee Giles. His research lies at the intersection of language, memory, cognition, computation, and information theory, spanning natural language processing, computational neuroscience, formal language theory, and theoretical machine learning.

Dr. Mali’s work seeks to understand the theoretical and empirical foundations underlying the success of deep learning in language understanding, sequence modeling, and representation learning. His research develops brain-inspired and information-theoretic learning algorithms, including predictive coding, memory-augmented neural architectures, and minimum-description-length-based approaches for building more stable, interpretable, and robust AI systems. These methods address challenges in continual and lifelong learning, learning from limited supervision, reinforcement learning, and robustness across both vision and language tasks.

PhD Students

• Hitesh Vaidya

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  Computer Science & Engineering
  Continual Learning, Bio-mimetic Machine Learning
  hvaidya [at] usf [dot] edu

  

• Theophilus Amaefuna

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  Computer Science & Engineering
  Predictive coding, NLP
  ikennaamaefuna [at] usf [dot] edu

  

• Shion Matsumoto

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  Computer Science & Engineering
  Bio-inspired learning, PINNs
  matsumoto [at] usf [dot] edu

  

• Benjamin Prada

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  Computer Science & Engineering
  Neural program synthesis, expressability & learnability
  bprada [at] usf [dot] edu

  

• Sree Rushitha Santhoshi Mamidala

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  Computer Science & Engineering
  Neuro-symbolic Language Models, NLP
  sreerushitha [at] usf [dot] edu
  

  

• Chaitanya Sharma

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  Big Data Analytics
  Trustworthy AI, AI Robustness
  sharma8 [at] usf [dot] edu

  

Undergraduate Students

• Yusra Rasool

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  Computer Science & Engineering
  yrasool [at] usf [dot] edu
  

  

Visiting Students

• Hyeonjin (Monica) Jee

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  Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering
  hjee [at] usf [dot] edu
  

  

Alumni

PhD Students

• Neisarg Dave, advised by Dr. C. Lee Giles, Dr. Dan Kifer, Dr. Ankur Mali
• Haiwen Guan, advised by Dr. C. Lee Giles and Dr. Ankur Mali
• Alex Bi, advised by Dr. Parisa Shokouhi and Dr. Ankur Mali

Master's Students

• Joo-Young Gonzalez, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Tahsun Rahman Khan, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Thejasvi Valega, advised by Dr. Parisa Shokouhi and Dr. Ankur Mali
• Sudarshan Nayak, advised by Dr. Dan Kifer, Dr. Parisa Shokouhi, and Dr. Ankur Mali
• Alfredo Fernandez, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali.
• Gerardo Wibmer, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali

Undergraduate Students

• Abdul-Malik Zekri, PhD student at Harvard University, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Raul Castillo, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Zhanna Sergeeva, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Tasnia Simin, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Shrabon Kumar Das, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali
• Mustafa Mannan, advised by Dr. Ankur Mali