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sardean

@sardean.bsky.social
68 followers 86 following 63 posts

asst prof @cornellbowers.bsky.social thinking about dynamics, control, machine learning sdean.website

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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
in March, I gave an intro for Cornell's "Science on Screen" program for a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have been meaning to share what I said, and now seems as good a time as ever.
leaflet.pub
Science on Screen: AI, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to Today
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
if you start an RL course with policy gradient, what does it look like to eventually introduce MDPs? here is my attempt: sdean.website/rl-manuscrip...
sdean.website
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
imagining how to start an advanced undergraduate reinforcement learning course without MDPs but with policy gradients. Here is what I came up with so far, feedback is welcome! sdean.website/rl-manuscrip...
sdean.website
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
working on some lecture notes to guide my revamped undergraduate reinforcement learning course this fall. (as you can from the page numbers, its still mostly blank.) we are going to dive into policy gradients before uttering the name Markov 😲
screenshot of pdf contents:

1 Introduction and Overview 3
2 Policies, Optimization, and Gradients 4
3 Sequential Decisions 18
4 Value Iteration 20
5 Policy Iteration 21
6 Online Decision-making 22
7 Receding Horizon Planning 23
8 Learning from Experts 24
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
tomorrow at ICML my student Sunmook will present a poster on this fun paper, led by postdoc Yahya Sattar: arxiv.org/abs/2606.12691 come for a rigorous view of "representation learning" and the latent space of "world models", stay for the linear systems theory and matrix factorization!
arxiv.org
Two-Layer Linear Auto-Regressive Models Estimate Latent States
Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical quest...
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
tomorrow (today over in Korea) Haruka will be presenting this paper in the ICML. working on this project with her (and folks at Meta) is part of what convinced me to revamp my undergraduate RL course (more on that later). check out the poster at the Wednesday poster session! arxiv.org/abs/2605.26385
arxiv.org
Credit-assigned Policy Gradient for Early Stage Retrieval in Two-stage Ranking
Large-scale search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically employ a two-stage architecture: an early-stage ranker (ESR) generates a candidate set, which is subseque...
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Reposted by sardean
Aaron Roth @aaroth.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
If you work at the intersection of CS and economics (or think your work is of interest to those who do!) consider submitting to the ESIF Economics and AI+ML meeting this summer at Cornell: www.econometricsociety.org/regional-act...
econometricsociety.org
2026 ESIF Economics and AI+ML Meeting - The Econometric Society
2026 ESIF Economics and AI+ML Meeting (ESIF-AIML2026) June 16-17, 2026 Cornell University Department...
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
having just finished the lecture portion of my PhD level ML in Feedback Systems course, and it turns out that everything I understand in ML/control is basically linear least squares
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
I launched these balloons as part of an outreach program: bowers.cornell.edu/news-stories... it was a lot of fun! Turns out weather balloons are a great way to talk about both classic and modern "AI"
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
small conferences are lots of fun! consider joining us next June in LA, and share with folks who might be interested.
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
two weeks ago, I launched a weather balloon. After a loop de loop over the middle of the Atlantic, it's currently making its way over north Africa. windbornesystems.com/balloon-soci...
A weather balloon's path from North America over the Atlantic to North Africa
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sardean @sardean.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
I DO!
photo of wildflowers in front of a rock cliff with a waterfall at Taughannock Falls in Trumansburg, NY.
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