Sridhar Mahadevan
Adjunct Professor
Director, Data Science Lab, Adobe Research
Co-Director, Autonomous Learning Laboratory
Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence
Imagination Science
Machine Learning
Variational Inequalities
CONTACT INFO:
firstname.i.lastname AT gmail
Administrative Assistant: Sarah Byrne
After 17 years of being a full-time faculty member at UMass (from 2001-2018), I am now an Adjunct Professor (effective 9/1/2018). I am currently Director of the Data Science Lab at Adobe Research in San Jose, CA. Adobe's Digital Experience Cloud processes trillions of consumer transactions on behalf of thousands of corporations, involving hundreds of petabytes of data. Understanding how to design machine learning algorithms that operate at such massive web scales is an exciting challenge that has drawn me to the Bay Area. Elias Bareinboim, Sridhar Mahadevan, Judea Pearl, Bernhard Scholkopf, and Prasad Tadepalli, Beyond Curve Fitting: Causation, Counterfactuals, and Imagination-based AI, AAAI Spring Symposium, March 25-27, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, 2019.
Sridhar Mahadevan, Imagination Machines: A New Challenge for Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Conference, 2018 (received the Blue Sky Paper Award from the Computing Community Consortium).
I am developing a new framework called imagination science. Traditional data science, like statistics, constructs descriptive summaries of experience, and answers the question "What is?", converting experience into probability distributions. Imagination Science explores a much broader palette of questions, including answering "What if?" interventional queries, as well as "Why?" explanations, and counterfactual imagination-type reasoning. I am co-organizing a AAAI Symposium on this topic in March next year.
