I am a professor of Statistics and Computer Science at Columbia University. I am also a member of the Columbia Data Science Institute. I work in the fields of machine learning and Bayesian statistics.

See my CV and publications.

My research interests include:

• Topic models
• Probabilistic modeling
• Approximate Bayesian inference

Here are three recent talks:

• Probabilistic Topic Models and User Behavior
• Variational Inference: Foundations and Innovations
• The Blessings of Multiple Causes

Most of our publications are attached to open-source software. See our GitHub page.

Follow the Blei lab on Twitter.

Machine Learning at Columbia

Columbia has a thriving machine learning community, with many faculty and researchers across departments. The Machine Learning at Columbia mailing list is a good source of information about talks and other events on campus. (To subscribe, send email to machine-learning-columbia+subscribe@googlegroups.com.)

Teaching

In Fall 2023 I am teaching Probabilistic Models and Machine Learning. To register, please join the waiting list and come to the first lecture. We will enroll students into the class during the first week of the semester. Priority is given first to PhD students and then to others.

All my courses are here.

Office hours

During the academic year I hold weekly office hours in 430 Mudd. Coming to my office hours is easier than using email to make an appointment.

Research group

Students and postdocs:

• Casey Bradshaw
• Amir Feder
• Alessandro Grande
• Gemma Moran
• Achille Nazaret
• Yookoon Park
• Sohrab Salehi
• Claudia Shi
• Brian Trippe
• Keyon Vafa
• Eli Weinstein
• Luhuan Wu
• Linying Zhang
• Carolina Zheng

Former students and postdocs:

• Jaan Altosaar   (Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University)
• Jordan Boyd-Graber   (Associate Professor, University of Maryland)
• Allison Chaney   (Assistant Professor, Duke University)
• Jonathan Chang   (Lead Developer, Health Coda)
• Laurent Charlin   (Assistant Professor, University of Montreal)
• Adji Dieng (Google -> Assistant Professor, Princeton)
• Sean Gerrish   (Google)
• Sam Gershman   (Professor, Harvard University)
• Prem Gopalan   (Voleon Capital)
• Lauren Hannah   (Apple)
• Matt Hoffman   (Google)
• Alp Kucukelbir   (Founder, Fero Labs)
• Kriste Krstovski   (Associate Research Scientist, Columbia University)
• Dawen Liang   (Netflix)
• Scott Linderman (Assistant Professor, Stanford University)
• Liping Liu   (Assistant Professor, Tufts University)
• Jackson Loper   (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan)
• Jeremy Manning   (Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College)
• Andrew Miller   (Apple)
• David Mimno   (Associate Professor, Cornell University)
• Stephan Mandt   (Assistant Professor, University of California Irvine)
• Christian Naesseth   (Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam)
• John Paisley   (Associate Professor, Columbia University)
• James McInerney   (Neflix)
• Gungor Polatkan   (LinkedIn)
• Rajesh Ranganath   (Assistant Professor, New York University)
• Maja Rudolph   (Bosch Research)
• Francisco Ruiz   (DeepMind)
• Aaron Schein   (Assistant Professor, University of Chicago)
• Dhanya Sridhar  (Assistant Professor, University of Montreal)
• Kui Tang
• Wesley Tansey (Principal Investigator, Memorial Sloan Kettering)
• Dustin Tran (Google)
• Victor Veitch   (Assistant Professor, Universtiy of Chicago)
• Yixin Wang   (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan)
• Chong Wang   (ByteDance)
• Mingzhang Yin   (Assistant Professor, University of Florida)