Wittawat Jitkrittum is a research scientist at Google Research. From 2018 to 2020, he was a postdoctoral researcher working with Bernhard Schoelkopf at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tuebingen, Germany. He earned his PhD in 2017 from Gatsby Unit, University College London with a thesis on informative features for comparing distributions. He received a best paper award at NeurIPS 2017 and the ELLIS PhD award 2019 for outstanding dissertation. Wittawat has broad research interests covering kernel methods, deep generative models, and approximate Bayesian inference. He served as a publication chair for AISTATS 2016, a program committee for NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, among others, and is a co-organizer of the Machine Learning Summer School 2020, the Southeast Asia Machine Learning School (SEAMLS 2019) in Indonesia and a co-organizer of the first Machine Learning Research School (MLRS 2019) in Thailand.

Wittawat’s full CV can be found here.

Education

2017 PhD in Machine Learning
Gatsby Unit, University College London
Thesis: Kernel-based distribution features for statistical tests and Bayesian inference
2012 MEng in Computer Science
Sugiyama lab, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Thesis: Feature selection via $L_1$-penalized squared-loss mutual information
2009 BSc in Computer Science
Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT), Thammasat University

Awards and Honors

2019 ELLIS PhD Award
Outstanding research achievements during the dissertation phase. For my PhD thesis.
2017 NeurIPS 2017 Best Paper
Awarded to 3 out of 3240 submissions to NeurIPS 2017.
Media coverage as podcast by TWiML & AI
2013 Gatsby Unit Studentship (PhD study)
Full scholarship with stipend for PhD study.
2010 Okazaki Kaheita Scholarship (master study)
Full scholarship with stipend for master study.
2010 Second Prize at National Software Contest (NSC)
Category: Thai Language Processing
Project: Thai Text Tokenization with a Binary Classifier
2009 Second Prize at National Software Contest (NSC)
Category: Software for Scientific Development
Project: Question Answering System for Thai Wikipedia
2009 Honor Award from King Bhumibol Adulyadej (รางวัลเรียนดี “ทุนภูมิพล”)
2004 Thai Wacoal Scholarship
Full scholarship for a one-year intensive Japanese program at Waseda Education (Thailand)

Services

Review for

Event Organization

2020 Co-organizer of Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS) 2020, Tuebingen, Germany
2019 Co-organizer of Southeast Asia Machine Learning School (SEA MLS) 2019, Jakarta, Indonesia
2019 Co-organizer of Machine Learning Research School (MLRS) 2019, Bangkok, Thailand