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Siddartha Devic

devic [at] usc.edu

Computer Science Department
University of Southern California

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About

I’m Sid, a CS PhD student in the USC Theory Group, where I am fortunate to be advised by the wonderful Vatsal Sharan and Aleksandra Korolova. I am broadly interested in (1) trustworthy, fair, and robust AI; and (2) theoretical machine learning. I am grateful to have my research supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship.

During Fall 2024, I will be a visitor at the Simons institute modern paradigms in generalization research program. Happy to chat with anyone in the area! I was lucky to intern with Gaurush Hiranandani at Amazon during Summer 2024, working on black-box metric optimization for vision and language models. Here is my CV (Nov. 2023).

I completed my undergraduate degrees in math and CS at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), where I explored research in networking, theory, optimization, and reinforcement learning. Along the way, I was extremely fortunate to be advised by these amazing professors: Nick Ruozzi, Jason Jue, Brendan Juba, and Ben Raichel.

If you are a prospective PhD applicant, I am happy to help in any way I can. Please feel free to reach out over email.

Publications and Preprints

(αβ) indicates alphabetical order, standard in theoretical computer science.
(*) indicates equal contribution.

Workshop Papers and Other

Mentorship

Service

Reviewer: Neurips 2024, ICLR 2025.

Student Activities

The first year of my PhD, I served as a CS department senator within the USC Viterbi Graduate Student Association (VGSA), where I was able to bring goats to campus (amongst other things).

I served as President / VP for my undergrad’s ACM chapter, where I am most proud to have established a perpetual $30k endowed scholarship with club funds. Importantly, the scholarship may also grant eligible students an in-state tuition waiver! Students can apply here.

I also served as the undergrad representative on the UTD CS department head search committee during the 2020-2021 academic year.

If you are a UTD student interested in pursuing a PhD, you may find the grad school section I wrote of this guide helpful. Also check out this research internship / REU masterlist which I put together.

Fun

In my free time I enjoy climbing/bouldering, surfing, hiking, and skiing (the latter two less frequently!). I have (at some point in the past) also attempted the following: learning art, running, calisthenics progressions, playing classical piano, swimming, and binging npr tiny desk concerts.

Some other stuff from undergrad:

Rejections

Here is a list of some of my rejections (e.g. jobs, fellowships, etc.) to help normalize the fact that most things don't work out :D



Give, even if you only have a little.

-Siddhartha Gautama