Brief Bio

Sattar Vakili is a senior AI researcher at MediaTek Research, the research arm of MediaTek — the 4th largest global fabless semiconductor company. He specializes in problems involving sequential decision-making in uncertain environments, with a focus on optimization, bandit and reinforcement learning, kernel-based modeling, and neural networks. Before joining MediaTek Research, Sattar worked at Secondmind.ai, a research lab in Cambridge, UK, led by Professor Carl Rasmussen, Cambridge University. There, he gained expertise in kernel-based and Gaussian process models. Prior to that, he was a postdoc at Princeton University. Sattar earned his PhD under the supervision of Professor Qing Zhao at Cornell University in 2017 with a dissertation on sequential methods for learning and optimization.