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 Spring 2023 I am teaching Applied Causality. We are focusing on multi-environment learning.

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
• 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)