Christopher Lazarus Garcia [email protected] (650) 250-6205

EDUCATION Ph.D. Candidate, Computational and Mathematical Engineering Sept. 2016 - present Stanford University, CA Advisor: Professor Mykel Kochenderfer, Affiliations: Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab, Stanford Center for AISafety Interests: Decision-making under uncertainty, Markov Decision Processes, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Safe AI, Verification of Deep Neural Networks, Safe Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning, Deep Learning

M.S., Computational and Mathematical Engineering - Data Science Track Sept. 2016 - Sept. 2018 Stanford University, CA

B.S., Telematics Engineering (EE/CS) (with Honors) Sept. 2008 - June 2013 B.S., Applied Mathematics (with Honors) Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Mexico City

Student Exchange Université Paris Dauphine, Paris, France, 2011

EXPERIENCE Research Assistant Sept. 2017 - present Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Stanford Center for AI Safety • Developing and implementing precise mathematical models to guarantee the safety, security, and robustness of rein- forcement learning methods for autonomous vehicles and unmanned aircraft • Developing verification algorithms that leverage Satisfiability Modulo Theories to certify the input/output behaviorof deep neural networks enabling them to be deployed in safety critical settings • Designing systems to intelligently manage exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in safety-critical environments; using con- strained policy optimization approaches to obtain probabilistic safety guarantees in place of less reliable reward-shaping

AI Research June - Sept. 2019 Apple, Cupertino, CA • Optimization methods for efficient deep neural networks

Teaching Assistant Stanford University, CA Jan. - Apr. 2018 • Advanced Software Development for Scientists and Engineers Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Mexico City Aug. 2013 - May 2014 • Linear Regression, Multivariate Analysis, Stochastic Processes, Calculus of Probabilities, Mathematical Statistics

Software Engineering Intern June - Sept. 2017 Google, Mountain View, CA • Designed a Machine Learning framework to identify when location should be used as a feature in determining ads to be shown alongside query results; involved large scale data analysis using distributed computing (C++, MapReduce)

Chief Data Scientist Sept. 2014 - Sept. 2016 Yaxi - Leading taxi hailing mobile app in Mexico, Mexico City • Used historic data to imrpove dispatch system, thereby decreasing arrival times by 30% and increasing fulfillment rate • Developed electronic payment fraud prevention system which reduced chargebacks by 10% • Created a system to detect anomalies and enforce fair pricing, which eliminated price abuse • Optimized service fee structure, thereby increasing revenue by 35%

Data Science Fellow June - Aug. 2014 The Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellowship, University of Chicago, IL • Developed an algorithm for interpolating and extrapolating temporospatial data to generate micro-climate information for natural reserves • Used NLP methods on 20 million documents to model job market dynamics to guide the City of Chicago’s skill training efforts and to identify non-obvious potential job candidates

Research Assistant Summer 2013 Information and Computer Science Department, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland • Worked on a feature selection algorithm for binary variables based on mutual information under Prof. Juho Rousu Software Development 2008 - 2015 Freelance • Developed software for diverse companies. Mostly web-based applications, both front-end and back-end solutions

RESEARCH Publications • The Marabou Framework for Verification and Analysis of Deep Neural Networks G. Katz, D. A. Huang, D. Ibeling, K. Julian, C. Lazarus, R. Lim, P. Shah, S. Thakoor, H. Wu, A. Zeljic, D. L. Dill, M. J. Kochenderfer, and C. Barrett International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), 2019.

• NeuralVerification.jl: Algorithms for verifying deep neural networks C. Liu, T. Arnon, C. Lazarus, and M. J. Kochenderfer Workshop on Debugging Machine Learning, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2019 Best Paper Award

• Algorithms for verifying deep neural networks C. Liu, T. Arnon, C. Lazarus, C. Barrett, and M. J. Kochenderfer ArXiv, iss. 1903.06758, 2019

• Identifying the skills gap to reduce unemployment using natural language processing Calderon N., Cambo S., Lazarus C., Stern R. 20th Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD), 2014

Talks • Contributed Talk NeuralVerification.jl: Algorithms for Verifying Deep Neural Networks Debugging Machine Learning Models workshop at ICLR 2019

• Lecturer CARS Workshop on Neural Verification Center for Automotive Research at Stanford June 2019

• Panelist Data Science Panel CONDATOS - Open Data Regional Conference for Latin America the Caribbean by invitation of the Office of the President of Mexico Mexico City. August 24 - 27, 2014

Projects • A Formal Approach Towards Deep Learning Interpretability, Technical Report

• HalluciGraph: Hallucinating edges for knowledge transfer across graph domains, Technical Report

• Constructing Conditionally Cooperative Agents for Complex Social Dilemmas Using Deep Reinforcement Learning, Technical Report

SKILLS Software: Python, C++, Julia, Java, SQL, MATLAB, R, PHP, HTML, CSS Technologies: MapReduce, Google App Engine, django, REST APi’s, Flask Libraries: Tensorflow, PyTorch, NumPy, SciPy, JuMP, matplotlib, scikit-learn, pandas, StatsModels, nltk Databases: SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google BigQuery, Google Data Store, MongoDB Scripting and Tooling: git, Jupyter, awk, grep, zsh, cut, gnu parallel Tools: nano, PyCharm, git, IPython, Jupyter Languages: Spanish (Native), English (Fluent), French (Intermediate) AWARDS

• Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship 2015 - 2017 • Dataton (Mexican Federal Gov. Data Science Contest) Finalist Summer 2014 • Academic Excellence - ITAM Telematics Eng. Spring 2014 • Academic Excellence - ITAM Telematics Eng. - Highest GPA Fall 2013 • Academic Excellence - ITAM Telematics Eng. - Highest GPA Spring 2013 • Academic Excellence - ITAM Telematics Eng. - Highest GPA Fall 2012 • Academic Excellence - ITAM Telematics Eng. - Highest GPA Spring 2012

SOCIAL INVOLVEMENT Volunteering • Contributed developing the technological platform for WikiPartido.mx a technology based political party 2012 • Developed the first version of QueAprendemosHoy.com a knowledge sharing platform 2011 • 3 months in northern India teaching English and Math 2009

EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES • Elected Student Representative, Applied Mathematics • Named Delegate for the US-MEX Forum for Cooperation, Understanding and Solidarity, attended summits in Mexico City and Stanford • Studied music for 8+ years • Half-marathon runner (about 10) and triathlete (about 15 olympic distance) • Road Cyclist