Jim Zhao

jim.zhao at unibas dot ch

I am a third year PhD student at University of Basel under the supervision of Prof. Aurelien Lucchi working on optimization methods and its application to Machine Learning. Prior to that I obtained my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at the Technical University of Munich. 

For more details you can check my curriculum vitae.

My current research is in developing second-order optimization methods, and understanding the geometry of loss landscapes in neural networks. Previous to my PhD, I have also worked on optoacoustic tomography and MRI and am still interested in medical imaging.
Hit me up if you want to chat about it!

In my free time, I dance Lindy hop, sing and play Badminton. I am a big fan of Hermann Hesse. More recently, I started to write some songs myself, which you are welcome to check out on Spotify or Youtube.

Preprints

Publications

Cubic regularized subspace Newton for non-convex optimization.
Oral (Top 2%) at 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
Zhao, J.*, Lucchi, A.*, Doikov, N.*

Theoretical characterization of Gauss-Newton conditioning in Neural networks. 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (Neurips 2024)
Zhao, J.*, Singh, SP.*, Lucchi, A.

Deep optoacoustic localization microangiography of ischemic stroke in mice. Nature Communications 14 (1), 3584
Deán-Ben, X., Robin, J., Nozdriukhin, D., Ni, R., Zhao, J., Glück, C., Droux, J., Sendón-Lago, J., Chen, Z., Zhou, Q., Weber, B., Wegener, S., Vidal, A., Arand, M., El Amki, M., Razansky, D. 

Optoacoustic visualization of individual core-shell microparticles in vivo.
Proc. SPIE 11960, Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2022, 1196016 (3 March 2022).
Nozdriukhin, D., Kalva, S.K., Li, W., Zhao, J., Yashchenok, A., Gorin, D., Razansky, D., & Deán-Ben, X.L.

Measuring the supporting slats of laser cutting machines using laser triangulation. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 108(11), 3819-3833. (2020).
Struckmeier, F., Zhao, J., & León, F. P. 

Workshops

Batch size selection by stochastic optimal control. Has it Trained Yet? NeurIPS 2022 Workshop, 2022.
Zhao, J., Lucchi, A., Proske, F.B., Orvieto, A., & Kersting, H.

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect, the whole world looks like home for a while.”

Hermann Hesse

“Ihr höheren Menschen, euer Schlimmstes ist: ihr lerntet alle nicht tanzen, wie man tanzen muß — über euch hinweg tanzen! Was liegt daran, daß ihr mißrietet!
Wie vieles ist noch möglich! So lernt doch über euch hinweglachen! Erhebt eure Herzen, ihr guten Tänzer, hoch! höher! Und vergeßt mir auch das gute Lachen nicht!”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra