Kriste Krstovski

Kriste Krstovski is an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia Business School and an associate research scientist at the Data Science Institute. Previously he was a postdoctoral research scientist working with David Blei at Columbia University and John Lafferty at Yale University.

Kriste received his Ph.D. in computer science from University of Massachusetts Amherst with David Smith. He spent half of his Ph.D. as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where under the supervision of Michael J. Kurtz he researched efficient latent variable models of text as part of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

Before his doctoral studies, he was a Staff Scientist in the Speech and Language Processing Department at Raytheon BBN Technologies. His research at BBN spanned various DARPA projects, including DARPA's TransTac, MADCAT and BOLT programs. While working full-time at BBN, he attended two semesters at MIT as a special graduate student in the EECS department.

He finished his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering at the University of New Hampshire, where he was a member of the Consolidated Advanced Technologies for Law Enforcement Laboratory (CATLab). As a member of CATLab, he was a key contributor in the development of the revolutionary Project54 system - a completely integrated voice controlled police cruiser.

His research interests span across the following areas:

• Machine Learning: probabilistic modeling and Bayesian latent variable models of text
• Natural Language Processing
• Information Retrieval
• Machine Translation: modeling comparable corpora

AWARDS AND HONORS

• Harvard University President’s Innovation Challenge, Runner-up, 2016
• Raytheon BBN Technologies Science Development Program Publications Award, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013
• U.S. Army Observer-Controller Academy Certificate of Appreciation, JRTC-Fort Polk, LA, 2008
• IEEE Larry K. Wilson Student Award Nominee, 2004
• IEEE (NH Section) Outstanding Young Engineer of the Year Award Nominee, 2003
• Tau Beta Pi
• University of New Hampshire Honors Student Award, 2003
• University of New Hampshire Dean’s Highest Honors List