Sattar Vakili is a senior AI researcher at MediaTek Research, the research arm of MediaTek — a globally renowned semiconductor company. He specializes in problems involving sequential decision-making in uncertain environments, with a focus on optimization, bandit and reinforcement learning, kernel-based modeling, and neural networks. Before joining MediaTek Research, Sattar worked at Secondmind, a research lab in Cambridge, UK, led by Professor Carl Rasmussen, Cambridge University. There, he gained expertise in kernel-based and Gaussian process models. Prior to that, he was a postdoc at Princeton University. Sattar earned his PhD under the supervision of Professor Qing Zhao at Cornell University in 2017 with a dissertation on sequential methods for learning and optimization.
Research Experience
- 2020 - : Senior AI researcher at MediaTek Ressearch.
- 2018-2020: Senior machine learning researcher at Seondmind Labs. Director: Professor Carl Rasmussen, Cambridge University.
- 2017-2018: Postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. Advisor: Professor Mung Chaing.
Education
- 2017: Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a Minor Degree in Applied Mathemathics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Advisor: Professor Qing Zhao.
- 2013: M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA.
- 2011: B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.