Rate My Professor Praneeth Vepakomma

Praneeth Vepakomma is an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and an M.Sc. in Mathematical and Applied Statistics from Rutgers University. Prior to his academic appointments, he accumulated extensive industrial experience at Meta, Apple, Amazon Web Services, Motorola Solutions, Corning, and several startups.

Professor Vepakomma’s research centers on developing algorithms for distributed and private computation in statistics, machine learning, and data science, with emphases on privacy, efficiency, responsible AI, collaborative intelligence, federated learning, differential privacy, and efficient fine-tuning of large language models. He has organized workshops at conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IJCAI, and CVPR. His contributions include numerous publications in venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI, TMLR, and Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning. He has received the Meta PhD Research Fellowship in Applied Statistics, the ADIA Lab Fellowship, two SERC Scholarships from MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, and best paper awards including a Baidu Best Paper Award at NeurIPS-SpicyFL and the FL-IJCAI Best Student Paper Award. His co-founded non-profit Integrity Distributed received the Financial Times Digital Innovation Award.