School of Engineering
Showing 341-360 of 455 Results
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Alexander Spangher
Postdoctoral Scholar, Computer Science
BioAlexander Spangher is a post-doctoral researcher advised by Daniel Ho, Sanmi Koyejo and Diyi Yang. His research focuses on modeling human decision-making in creative domains, especially in contexts where data is limited and rewards and goals are less clear. He is building out a new domain of learning, called emulation learning, with the goal of training the next generation of reasoning-oriented language models to be more proficient in these domains. His research has been used at technology organizations like OpenAI, Google and EleutherAI. He is especially passionate about helping journalists and has framed tasks and trained reasoning LLMs to help journalists find stories and sources, structure narratives and track information updates. These tools have been incorporated into newsrooms at the New York Times, Bloomberg and Stanford Big Local News, impacting thousands of journalists; and his work is also informing the next generation of journalistic education at USC Annenberg. His work has received numerous awards including two outstanding paper awards at EMNLP 2024, one spotlight award at ICML 2024, one outstanding paper award at NAACL 2022 and a best paper award at CJ2023; and he has been supported by a 4-year Bloomberg PhD Fellowship. His work is broad: in addition to his work in NLP and computational journalism, he has studied misinformation at Microsoft Research and collaborated with the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center to model plasma fusion processes.
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Jakob Thumm
Postdoctoral Scholar, Aeronautics and Astronautics
BioJakob is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research aims to improve the safety, efficiency, and acceptance of autonomous robots by combining formal methods and machine learning. Jakob focuses on developing algorithms that enable robots to efficiently act in dynamic environments while guaranteeing safety at all times. He is particularly interested in allowing robots to safely work together with humans.
Prior to joining Stanford, Jakob earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Munich. His doctoral thesis is titled ``Establishing Safe and Preference-Aligned Human-Robot Collaboration in Autonomous Manipulation'' and passed with highest distinctions. Jakob received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Mechatronics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, researching the intersection of system modelling and machine learning.
Outside the lab, Jakob is a passionate runner and volunteer at Sutro Stewards, where he maintains hiking trails in the heart of San Francisco.
