Tim Lau
AI Researcher at DRW
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTim Lau is an AI researcher with nine years of experience at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and statistics, currently advancing generative AI research at DRW in Palo Alto. His work spans theory and practice of optimization and sampling for LLMs, vision transformers, and score-based generative models, with a strong focus on stochastic, nonsmooth, nonconvex and distributionally robust algorithms. He brings a rigorous academic foundation—PhD work at Northwestern and postdoctoral stints at Chicago Booth and UPenn—into industrial research, including an AWS AI Labs internship on large-scale optimization for model pretraining. Tim’s profile blends deep theoretical insight with hands-on experimentation across LLM training strategies and diffusion models, and he often explores the subtle interplay between optimization dynamics and sampling behavior that many practitioners overlook.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Exchange Program Option Mathématiques Appliquées - Data Sciences Track, Exchange Program Option Mathématiques Appliquées - Data Sciences Track at CentraleSupélecThe University of Hong Kong (HKU)Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Statistics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Statistics at Northwestern UniversityHong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)Duke-Tsinghua Machine Learning Summer School Machine Learning Deep Learning, Duke-Tsinghua Machine Learning Summer School Machine Learning Deep Learning at Duke Kunshan University
English, French, Chinese, Chinese
Github Skills (20)
genome10
encoder10
sequence10
machine-learning9
natural-language-processing9
gpu9
actor-critic9
nlp9
python8
deep-learning8
mujoco6
artificial-intelligence6
reinforcement-learning6
neural-network5
tensorflow5
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
timlautk/BCD-for-DNNs-PyTorch
Nov 2018 - Jun 2019
Code for Global Convergence of Block Coordinate Descent in Deep Learning (ICML 2019)
Contributions:67 commits, 35 pushes in 6 months
deep-learning
timlautk/BCD-for-DNNs
Jan 2018 - Mar 2018
Contributions:73 commits, 70 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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