Each year, the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellowship is awarded to doctoral students in recognition of their academic excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) achievements. We are proud to announce that of the 3,080 applications received this year, our student, Alex Kokot, has been selected to receive one of the 2023 NDSEG fellowship awards.
Alex is a second year Ph.D. student advised by Professor Marina Meila. His undergraduate degree was in Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, his predominant interests were in analysis, particularly operator theory and geometry, but he also collaborated on applied projects with chemists and engineers. Additionally, he was the president of the Math Club and volunteered in the Math Circle (a program that introduces middle school students to proof based mathematics), work which has continued at the UW Math Circle.
His current research interests are at the intersection of functional analysis and machine learning, utilizing techniques from PDEs and geometry to study and develop new methods. Currently, his research focuses on the interplay between diffusion operators and problems in supervised and unsupervised learning. These methods cover a wide scope, from the relationship between a noisy Laplacian and regression, to subsampling data with respect to smooth loss functions such as Sinkhorn divergences and MMD and studying optimal transport in highly structured settings.
The NDSEG fellowship program is sponsored by the Air Force office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the Office of the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering. This program is administered by the Systems Plus, Inc.