The BCV Research Fellowship is a community-based program for current PhD students and recent
doctoral graduates in AI. Over the course of fourteen weeks, fellows will build relationships with
each other and with the hosts of our small-group dinners.
Ashwin Balakrishna
Sr. Research Scientist, Google Deepmind
Ashwin is a proud California native and loves exploring all the wonderful natural beauty of the state. When he is not tinkering with robots, he also loves playing and watching any racket sport!
Vivian Fang
PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley
Vivian grew up in Oahu, Hawaii. She switches physical activities every time she gets injured---a ski boot hit her in the face last month.
Steven Feng
PhD, Stanford
Steven is a Stanford CS PhD student, AI researcher, avid gamer, and musician. Founder of Stanford Piano Society, instructor of CS25 Transformers, and passionate about advancing AI through interdisciplinary research. Enjoys dancing, table tennis, and mentoring students.
Margarita Geleta
PhD, UC Berkeley
Margarita Geleta was born in Ukraine, raised in Spain, and emigrated to the US for the PhD. Margarita has been employed by Stanford, Amazon, and Dolby. Recently Margarita started her own startup in defense tech.
Ghassen Jerfel
Sr. Research Scientist, Waymo
Ghassen is a Sr. Research Scientist at Waymo where he works on behavior prediction and planning under uncertainty. He has a PhD in Machine Learning from Duke and UC Berkeley where he was co-advised by Michael Jordan and Katherine Heller. Concurrently with his PhD, Ghassen worked half-time as a student researcher at Google Brain for 3 years.
Eliza Kosoy
PhD, UC Berkeley
Eliza is a PhD student at UC Berkeley working at the intersections of AI, UX and child development with Professor Alison Gopnikhas. Eliza has a pit bull rescue dog named Tiny Dinky Daffy.
Xingyu Lin
Postdoc, UC Berkeley
Xingyu has been passionate about robotics ever since AlphaGo's groundbreaking achievement in decision-making back in 2017. With a knack for building and understanding AI systems, Xingyu is driven by a vision of a future where robots handle labor and Universal Basic Income becomes a reality.
Ken Liu
PhD, Stanford AI Lab
Ken is a first-year Stanford CS Ph.D. student advised by Percy Liang and Sanmi Koyejo. Previously he earned an MS at CMU and undergrad at Sydney. He worked on differential privacy and federated learning at Google AI. His interests include trustworthy AI systems for privacy, security, and personalization.
Grace Luo
PhD, UC Berkeley
Grace is a PhD student at UC Berkeley where she is currently interested in studying the internal representations of generative models. In her free time she likes to run, listen to podcasts about art history and the internet, and write songs on her ukulele.
Luke Melas-Kyriazi
Visiting Research Scientist, Meta
Luke is a Rhodes Scholar and PhD student at Oxford University, as well as a Visiting Research Scientist at Meta Research. His research spans machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Outside of research, he enjoys running, traveling, and spending time outdoors.
Shishir Patil
PhD, UC Berkeley
Shishir Patil is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. He loves Sailing, and Ski-ing, although both of this you can find by Googling him. Shishir also likes to bike in the Berkeley hills and bikes up Hearst Ave to Soda Hall (steep!!) everyday.
Rohan Taori
PhD, Stanford
Rohan does ML research for Anthropic and is particularly excited about multimodality. He's also a huge warriors fan (watched 90% of regular season games back in 2015).
Alicia Tsai
PhD, UC Berkeley
Alicia is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Outside of work, she is a certified Yoga and Pilates instructor and an amateur drummer.
Paul Zhou
PhD, UC Berkeley
Paul is currently a PhD student at BAIR. He enjoys playing badminton, watching comedy shows and is a big fan of Dim sum.