Ananda Theertha Suresh Google Research, New York email: theertha at google dot com [Google scholar]

About me

I am a research scientist at Google Research, New York. I obtained my PhD in electrical and computer engineering from University of California, San Diego, where I was advised by Alon Orlitsky. Prior to joining UCSD, I obtained Bachelors degree in Engineering Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Research

''What is unseen, is not necessarily unknown'' - Wendelessen

I am interested in machine learning, information theory, and statistics. I have worked on problems related to distribution learning, property testing, and universal compression over large domains. Recently, I am interested in understanding the effects of memory and communication on optimization and learning.

Recent News

Jayadev Acharya, Alon Orlitsky, and I presented a tutorial on information theoretic aspects of data science and machine learning at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2016. The slides are here.

Publications

By year     By topic     Journal articles

• Distributed mean estimation with limited communication
  with F. Yu, H. B. McMahan, and S. Kumar [pdf]

• Sample complexity of population recovery
  with Y. Polyanskiy and Y. Wu [pdf]

• A unified maximum likelihood approach for optimal distribution property estimation
  with J. Acharya, H. Das, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• Orthogonal random features, NIPS 2016
  with F. Yu, K. Choromanski, D. Holtmann-Rice, and S. Kumar [pdf] (Oral presentation)

• Federated learning: Strategies for improving communication efficiency, NIPS PMPML workshop 2016
  with J. Konecny, H. B. McMahan, F. X. Yu, P. Richtarik, and D. Bacon [pdf]

• Optimal prediction of the number of unseen species, PNAS 2016
  with A. Orlitsky and Y. Wu [pdf]

• Learning Markov distributions: Does estimation trump compression?, ISIT 2016
  with M. Falahatgar, A. Orlitsky, and V. Pichapati [pdf]

• Estimating the number of defectives with group testing, ISIT 2016
  with M. Falahatgar, A. Jafarpour, A. Orlitsky, and V. Pichapati [pdf]

• Competitive distribution estimation: Why is Good-Turing good, NIPS 2015
  with A. Orlitsky [pdf] [talk] (Best Paper Award)

• Faster algorithms for testing under conditional sampling, COLT 2015
  with M. Falahatgar, A. Jafarpour, A. Orlitsky, and V. Pichapati [jmlr]

• On learning distributions from their samples, COLT 2015
  with S. Kamath, A. Orlitsky, and V. Pichapati [jmlr]

• Automata and graph compression, ISIT 2015
  with M. Mohri and M. Riley [pdf] [implementation]

• Universal compression of power-law distributions, ISIT 2015
  with M. Falahatgar, A. Jafarpour, A. Orlitsky, and V. Pichapati [pdf]

• Sparse solutions to nonnegative linear systems and applications, AISTATS 2015
  with A. Bhaskara and M. Zaghimoghaddam [arXiv]

• The complexity of estimating Renyi entropy, SODA 2015
  with J. Acharya, A. Orlitsky and H. Tyagi [arXiv]

• Near-optimal-sample estimators for spherical Gaussian mixtures, NIPS 2014
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [arXiv] [talk at simons]

• Sorting with adversarial comparators and application to density estimation, ISIT 2014
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• Efficient compression of monotone and m-modal distributions, ISIT 2014
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• Poissonization and universal compression of envelope classes, ISIT 2014
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• Sublinear algorithms for outlier detection and generalized closeness testing, ISIT 2014
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• Optimal probability estimation with applications to prediction and classification, COLT 2013
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf] [talk]

• Tight Bounds for Universal Compression of Large Alphabets, ISIT 2013
  with J. Acharya, H. Das, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• A competitive test for uniformity of monotone distributions, AISTATS 2013
  with J. Acharya, A. Jafarpour, and A. Orlitsky [pdf]

• Competitive classification and closeness testing, COLT 2012
  with J. Acharya, H. Das, A. Jafarpour, A. Orlitsky, and S. Pan [pdf] [talk]

• On the query computation and verification of functions, ISIT 2012
  with H. Das, A. Jafarpour, A. Orlitsky, and S. Pan [pdf]

• Strong and weak secrecy in wiretap channels, invited paper at ISTC 2010
  A. Subramanian, A. T. Suresh, S. Raj, A. Thangaraj, M. Bloch, and S. W. McLaughlin [pdf]

• Strong secrecy for erasure wiretap channels, ITW 2010
  A. T. Suresh, A. Subramanian, A. Thangaraj, M. Bloch, and S. W. McLaughlin [pdf]

• On optimal timer-based distributed selection For rate-adaptive multi-user diversity systems, NCC 2010
  A. T. Suresh, N. B. Mehta, and V. Shah [pdf] (Best Paper Award in Communications track)