I successfully defended my PhD at Northeastern University , under the advisement of Javed Aslam.

I am a researcher with expertise in multi-armed bandits and general machine learning. I am particularly interested in working in fields like recommender systems, personalization and advertisement. I also have an interest in speeding up training algorithms under budget (or time) constraints. For my PhD thesis, I developed bandit model algorithms for exploring and choosing good options when you have unlimited possibilities. I was the first to prove upper and lower bounds on the budget needed to find one of the top few of unlimited options, and my fixed-budget algorithm takes a surprising approach that empirically matches or outperforms all state-of-the-art algorithms. I have worked on applications like training greedy optimal boosted decision trees faster and finding the optimal dose in cancer clinical trials. I am also interested in pivoting to nearby fields, such as reinforcement learning.

Current project: I am currently wrapping up some work in the pure exploration setting of the infinitely-armed bandits in the fixed budget setting. This work is in collaboration with Kevin Jamieson and Javed Aslam.

Preprints/Under Review:

• On Multi-Armed Bandit Designs for Phase I Clinical Trials.
  Maryam Aziz, Emilie Kaufmann, Marie-Karelle Riviere. PDF

• Adaptively Pruning Features for Boosted Decision Trees.
  Maryam Aziz, Jesse Anderton, and Javed Aslam. PDF

Publications:

• Pure Exploration in Infinitely-Armed Bandit Models with Fixed-Confidence.
  Maryam Aziz, Jesse Anderton, Emilie Kaufmann and Javed Aslam.  ALT 2018. PDF

• Health Literacy and Usability of Clinical Trial Search Engines.
  Timothy Bickmore, Michael Paasche-Orlow, Maryam Aziz, Barbara Barry. Proc. Health Literacy Annual Research Conference (HARC) 2012.

• Using Computer Agents to Improve Emotional Wellbeing of Hospital Patients.
  Maryam Aziz, Timothy Bickmore, Laura Vardoulakis, Christopher Shanahan, Michael Paasche-Orlow. CHI workshop on Interaction Design and Emotional Wellbeing 2012. PDF

Research Experience:

• Fall 2012 – Present. Machine Learning Lab, CCIS, Northeastern University. Advised by Javed Aslam.
• Summer of 2016. Inria Lille, SequeL team. Worked with Emilie Kaufmann.
• Fall 2011 – Fall 2012. Relational Agents Lab, CCIS, Northeastern University. Mentored by Timothy Bickmore.

Teaching at Northeastern University:

Teaching Assistantship at Northeastern University: