Brian Bullins

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Joined department: Fall 2022

Education

Brian Bullins is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Previously, he was a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University, where he was advised by Elad Hazan, and his research was supported by a Siebel Scholarship. Before that, he received his B.S. degree from Duke University where he studied computer science and mathematics as a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar.

His interests broadly lie in both the theory and practice of optimization for machine learning. In particular, his work on improving matrix estimation techniques has led to novel higher-order methods for convex and nonconvex optimization with provable guarantees. He continues to explore how we might leverage these approaches for faster methods in the highly parallel setting of distributed optimization, and his work received a best paper award at COLT 2021.