Zico Kolter

Zico Kolter is the department head for the Machine Learning Department, which is in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to his full-time role at CMU, he also serves as chief scientist of AI research at Bosch, working in the Pittsburgh office. Bosch also generously provides funding for much of the research in his group.

His group’s work focuses on machine learning, optimization, and control. Specifically, much of the work aims at making deep learning algorithms safer, more robust, and more explainable; to these ends, they have worked on methods for training provably robust deep learning systems, and including more complex “modules” (such as optimization solvers) within the loop of deep architectures. They also focus on several application domains, with a particular focus on applications in smart energy and sustainability domains.