Alex Tamkin
PhD Student, Computer Science, Stanford University
Email: atamkin_stanford_edu | Twitter: alextamkin
I'm a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford, advised by Noah Goodman and part of the Stanford NLP Group. My research area is machine learning, especially applied to natural language processing. Recently, I've been thinking about curiosity, abstraction, and transfer in unsupervised learning.
In the past, I've worked on projects in reinforcement learning, HCI, and computational astronomy. I've also spent time at Google Brain, Google Language, and Google Civics.
I'm grateful to be supported by an Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship.
Publications
Viewmaker Networks: Learning Views for Unsupervised Representation Learning
Alex Tamkin, Mike Wu, Noah GoodmanPreprintLanguage Through a Prism: A Spectral Approach for Multiscale Language Representations
Alex Tamkin, Dan Jurafsky, Noah GoodmanNeurIPS 2020Investigating Transferability in Pretrained Language Models
Alex Tamkin, Trisha Singh, Davide Giovanardi, Noah GoodmanFindings of EMNLP 2020Distributionally-Aware Exploration for CVaR Bandits.
Alex Tamkin, Ramtin Keramati, Christoph Dann, and Emma Brunskill. NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Safety and Robustness in Decision Making; RLDM 2019Being Optimistic to Be Conservative: Quickly Learning a CVaR Policy
Ramtin Keramati, Christoph Dann, Alex Tamkin, and Emma Brunskill. AAAI 2020Recursive Routing Networks: Learning to Compose Modules for Language Understanding.
Ignacio Cases, Clemens Rosenbaum, Matthew Riemer, Atticus Geiger, Tim Klinger, Alex Tamkin, Olivia Li, Sandhini Agarwal, Joshua D Greene, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Potts, and Lauri KarttunenNAACL 2019Drone.io: A Gestural and Visual Interface for Human-Drone Interaction.
Jessica R Cauchard, Alex Tamkin, Cheng Yao Wang, Luke Vink, Michelle Park, Tommy Fang, and James A Landay. HRI 2019 Andrew Vanderburg, Christopher Shallue, Liang Yu, Anne Dattilo, and Alex Tamkin. American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts, 2019Personal
Other topics I think a lot about:
Fostering a healthy and inclusive research culture
AI policy, safety, and equity
Connecting people and ideas from different fields
Outside of research, I organize the Stanford Queer in AI Dinner with Stanford Inclusion in AI
I also like making art, especially ceramics and photography!