Venkat Chandrasekaran

Email: alpha@beta.edu (alpha = venkatc; beta = mit or berkeley)

Brief biography

I am a postdoc working with Professor Michael Jordan at Berkeley.

I received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in June 2011 from MIT, where my advisors were Professor Alan Willsky and Professor Pablo Parrilo in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. I also received an S.M. in EECS in June 2007 from MIT, and a B.A. in Mathematics as well as a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in May 2005 from Rice University in Houston, Texas.

I will be joining the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2012.

Research interests

My current research interests broadly lie in the areas of optimization, statistics, and signal processing. In the past I have worked on problems in computational harmonic analysis and approximation theory.

Publications

Journal papers

V. Chandrasekaran, P. A. Parrilo, and A. S. Willsky, Convex Graph Invariants, Preprint, December 2010.

V. Chandrasekaran, B. Recht, P. A. Parrilo, and A. S. Willsky, The Convex Geometry of Linear Inverse Problems, December 2010.

V. Chandrasekaran, P. A. Parrilo, and A. S. Willsky, Latent Variable Graphical Model Selection via Convex Optimization, Preprint, August 2010. (software)

V. Chandrasekaran, M. Chertkov, D. Gamarnik, D. Shah, and J. Shin, Counting Independent Sets using the Bethe Approximation, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 25, No. 2, July 2011.

V. Chandrasekaran, S. Sanghavi, P. A. Parrilo, and A. S. Willsky, Rank-Sparsity Incoherence for Matrix Decomposition, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2011.

M. J. Choi, V. Chandrasekaran, and A. S. Willsky, Gaussian Multiresolution Models: Exploiting Sparse Markov and Covariance Structure, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 58, No. 5, March 2010.

V. Chandrasekaran, M. B. Wakin, D. Baron, and R. G. Baraniuk, Representation and Compression of Multi-Dimensional Piecewise Functions Using Surflets, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 2009.

M. J. Choi, V. Chandrasekaran, D. M. Malioutov, J. K. Johnson, and A. S. Willsky, Multiscale Stochastic Modeling for Tractable Inference and Data Assimilation, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Vol. 297, August 2008.

V. Chandrasekaran, J. K. Johnson, and A. S. Willsky, Estimation in Gaussian Graphical Models Using Tractable Subgraphs: A Walk-Sum Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 56, No. 5, May 2008.

Conference papers

V. Chandrasekaran, S. Sanghavi, P. A. Parrilo, and A. S. Willsky, Sparse and Low-Rank Matrix Decompositions, 15th IFAC Symposium on System Identification (SYSID 2009), Saint-Malo, France, July 2009.

M. J. Choi, V. Chandrasekaran, and A. S. Willsky, Exploiting Sparse Markov and Covariance Structure in Multiresolution Models, 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2009), Montreal, Canada, June 2009.

V. Chandrasekaran, N. Srebro, and P. Harsha, Complexity of Inference in Graphical Models, 24th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (UAI 2008), Helsinki, Finland, July 2008.

V. Chandrasekaran, J. K. Johnson, and A. S. Willsky, Adaptive Embedded Subgraph Algorithms using Walk-Sum Analysis, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007), Vancouver, Canada, December 2007.

V. Chandrasekaran, J. K. Johnson, and A. S. Willsky, Maximum Entropy Relaxation for Graphical Model Selection given Inconsistent Statistics, IEEE 2007 Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP 2007), Madison, Wisconsin, August 2007.

J. K. Johnson, V. Chandrasekaran, and A. S. Willsky, Learning Markov Structure by Maximum Entropy Relaxation, 11th International Conference in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2007), San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 2007.

V. Chandrasekaran, M. B. Wakin, D. Baron, and R. G. Baraniuk, Surflets: A Sparse Representation for Multidimensional Functions Containing Smooth Discontinuities, IEEE 2004 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2004), Chicago, Illinois, June 2004.

V. Chandrasekaran, M. B. Wakin, D. Baron, and R. G. Baraniuk, Compression of Higher Dimensional Functions Containing Smooth Discontinuities, 38th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS 2004), Princeton, New Jersey, March 2004. (See supplemental tech report)

PhD thesis

V. Chandrasekaran, Convex Optimization Methods for Graphs and Statistical Modeling, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 2011.

Technical reports

V. Chandrasekaran, N. Srebro, and P. Harsha, Complexity of Inference in Graphical Models, May 2010.

Last updated: September 2011