Rate My Professor Tengyu Ma

Tengyu Ma is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics since 2018. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University, advised by Sanjeev Arora, and completed his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University. During his graduate studies, Ma was awarded the Siebel Scholarship and Princeton Honorific Fellowship, and he achieved 8th place in the 2010 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition as well as a Silver Medal in the 2007 International Mathematical Olympiad. His research spans machine learning, algorithms and their theory, non-convex optimization, deep learning and its theory, reinforcement learning, pre-training and foundation models, robustness, distributed optimization, and high-dimensional statistics. Ma employs techniques from theoretical computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, probability, and information theory to design nonlinear models and analyze nonconvex optimization landscapes in areas such as dictionary learning, matrix completion, tensor decomposition, and neural networks.