Farhad Pourkamali Anaraki is a new face in the Applied Mathematics Department. After receiving both his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. at CU Boulder, he has recently accepted an opportunity to return to the University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. He is excited to join the department because of their wonderful reputation when it comes to research and a high standard of academic excellence.
He is excited about the current semester because teaching gives him the opportunity to pass on knowledge to the new generation of scholars and scientists. “I view teaching, educating, and advising the new generation of engineers and scientists as core responsibilities of my academic career. Also, I am passionate about my research on analyzing massive high-dimensional sets that are ubiquitous in all modern domain applications. I consistently give talks in conferences, workshops, and colloquiums about my research,” said Farhad Pourkamali Anaraki.
This semester, he will be teaching Calculus 1 for Engineers. Anaraki considers the ability to think mathematically a very valuable skill and he hopes to pass onto his students. He attributes this skill to students who tend to stay engaged with the course material.
When it comes to his own academic passions he likes to focus more on the statistical analysis of data. “My research revolves around identifying fundamental tradeoffs between memory, computational, and statistical efficiency in analyzing modern data sets with the goal of developing practical data analysis methods. I use various tools from computer science, applied mathematics, and statistics to provide mathematical guarantees on the quality of learning algorithms with limited resources, i.e., memory and time. The rigorous characterization of these tradeoffs is then used to design efficient methods that learn the underlying structure of modern data sets in the form of subspaces, clusters, and manifolds with variety of applications in scientific disciplines,” said Anaraki.