Seo Taek Kong

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the ECE department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. R. Srikant. My research draws on applied probability and control theory to develop non-asymptotic analyses of stochastic algorithms. My thesis research spans three domains: stochastic gradient descent, reinforcement learning, and generative AI. By viewing machine learning algorithms as discretized diffusion processes, I identify new finite-time behavior and use the analysis for algorithm design in applications such as generative AI.

Alongside my thesis research, I have built search engines at NVIDIA and Amazon. Before my Ph.D., I spent three years at VUNO developing deep learning models for medical imaging.