CS PhD student Jason Mohoney is the recipient of a 2023 Apple Scholar in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning PhD Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes the contributions of researchers in computer science and engineering at the graduate and postgraduate level. Each Scholar receives funding as they pursue their PhD, internship opportunities, and mentorship with an Apple researcher in their field. Apple Scholars in AI/ML are selected based on their innovative research, record as thought leaders and collaborators, and commitment to advancing their respective fields.
Mohoney is a fourth-year PhD student advised by Theodoros Rekatsinas and Shivaram Venkataraman. He grew up in Madison and earned his undergraduate degree in Applied Math, Engineering, and Physics (AMEP) at UW-Madison.“My research has focused on the intersection of systems, machine learning, and databases,” says Mohoney. “With Roger Waleffe, I have been developing the graph learning system Marius. This system enables low-cost and high-throughput graph neural network training by maximizing hardware utilization. Recently I have been working on approximate nearest neighbor search, which is an essential (but expensive!) component of ML-powered search, recommendation, and virtual assistant applications.”
Mohoney says that the end-to-end vision for his research is “to design and implement a core set of systems and algorithms that enable fast, accurate, and low-cost learning and inference over multi-modality data.” Ultimately he hopes to apply his research to scientific computing challenges in physics, biology, and engineering.