About Me
I am an associate professor of Statistics at the University of Texas at Austin . I work in the intersection of high-dimensional statistics, optimization, and Machine Learning theory. I am a co-PI in EnCORE: Institute for Emerging CORE Methods of Data Science and am affiliated with AI institute. I am also a GSC member of Computer Science and Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. My email address is purna.sarkar@austin.utexas.edu.
Previously I was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked on asymptotic theory for network models and the nonparametric bootstrap for big data. I got my PhD from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. My thesis research has been aimed at analyzing theoretical properties of different proximity measures arising from random walks, and using them for designing fast algorithms. Here is a link to my thesis.
Before joining Carnegie Mellon, I was an undergraduate at the Computer Science and Engineering Department in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where I spent four years.