Sirisha Rambhatla

Assistant Professor, Management Sciences Department

Cross-Appointed Faculty at David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, and Systems Design Engineering Department 

Dr. Sirisha Rambhatla is an Assistant Professor in the Management Sciences Department, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Her research focusses on reliable artificial intelligence (AI) models for real-world decision making for critical applications in healthcare, intelligent automation, and climate change, using deep learning, time- series and spatiotemporal data analysis, explainable AI, and provable algorithms. Her inter disciplinary work spanning both theory and practice of machine learning (ML), has been published at top ML venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, and clinical venues such as AMIA, Urology Clinics North America, and Surgery.

Recipient of the prestigious 2021 Merit Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research by Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) at the University of Southern California, Dr. Rambhatla received her Ph.D. and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A. in 2019 and 2012, respectively. She is a passionate advocate for improving representation of women and under-represented groups in machine learning through her work as part of the Women in Machine Learning (WiML) community. More information about her work is available here.

Dr. Rambhatla supervises and co-supervises graduate students in machine learning. Her students and mentees leverage contemporary deep learning-based machine learning models to address a wide range of real-world problems ranging from improving healthcare outcomes, building data-driven robust systems for intelligent automation, and more recently aviation.

Selected Publications:

• S. Rambhatla, Z. Che, and Y. Liu. I-SEA: Importance Sampling and Expected Alignment-based Deep Distance Metric Learning for Time Series Analysis and Embedding. Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference on Artificial Intelligence.
• M. Tsang, S. Rambhatla, and Y. Liu (2020). How does this interaction affect me? Interpretable attribution for feature interactions. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
• S. Rambhatla, X. Li, and J. Haupt, NOODL: Provable Online Dictionary Learning and Sparse Coding, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).