Kriste Krstovski

I am an associate research scientist at the Data Science Institute and an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia Business School.

My current research focuses on developing machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques for social good, business, and healthcare. This includes building models for decision-making processes, financial analytics, predictive modeling, combating misinformation, and enhancing predictive healthcare. 

My work encompasses various topics in ML and NLP, such as probabilistic modeling, representation learning, Bayesian latent variable models of text, deep learning architectures, and natural language understanding. 

In the past, I have also worked on multilingual information retrieval, machine translation for speech and text, which involved modeling comparable corpora, and speech recognition, especially on low-resource platforms.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral research scientist working with David Blei at Columbia University and John Lafferty at Yale University. 

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst with David Smith. I spent half of my Ph.D. as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where I was researching efficient latent variable models of text as part of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) under the supervision of Michael J. Kurtz. 

Prior to starting my Ph.D. studies, I was a Staff Scientist in the Speech and Language Processing Department at Raytheon BBN Technologies where I worked with Prem Natarajan and Rohit Prasad. My research work at BBN span across various DARPA projects including DARPA's TransTac, MADCAT and BOLT programs. While working full-time at BBN, I attended two semesters at MIT as a special graduate student in the EECS department.

I finished my B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire while being a member of the Consolidated Advanced Technologies for Law Enforcement Laboratory (CATLab) under the supervision of Andrew L. Kun and W. Thomas Miller III. As a member of the CATLab team, I was a key contributor in the development of the revolutionary Project54 system - a completely integrated voice controlled police cruiser.

© Kriste Krstovski