Ross Boczar, PhD

rjboczar A-T gmail D-O-T com (Does this do anything?)

@roseboxcar

Bio

My research interests include learning theory, control, optimization, game theory, and other areas of applied mathematics.

I will be joining a Chicago-based trading firm as a Quantitative Researcher later this year.

Previously:

• I was an IFDS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington, working with Prof. Kevin Jamieson and Prof. Lillian Ratliff.
• I worked at Amazon Advertising and Amazon Go as an Applied Scientist from 2019-2021.
• In May 2019, I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, I was advised by Prof. Ben Recht in association with BAIR and was supported by the DoD NDSEG Fellowship.
• In 2016, I was an intern at Google Seattle.
• In 2015, I was a GSI for the first major-agnostic introductory data science course. During the course, I spent some time cramming machine learning classifiers into Tweets.
• I worked in the RISE Lab at NAVAIR in Lakehurst, NJ from 2012-2014,.
• In 2012, I received my MS in Electrical Engineering along with a BS in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.

I enjoy basketball and music.

Publications

Preprints

1. Arnab Maiti, Ross Boczar, Kevin Jamieson, Lillian J. Ratliff. "Query-Efficient Algorithms to Find Unique Nash Equilibria in Two-Player Zero-Sum Matrix Games." [arXiv]
2. Stephen Tu, Ross Boczar, "An elementary proof of anti-concentration for degree two non-negative Gaussian polynomials." [arXiv]
3. Stephen Tu, Ross Boczar, Andrew Packard, Benjamin Recht, "Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Robust Control from Coarse-Grained Identification." [arXiv]
4. Ross Boczar, Laurent Lessard, Andrew Packard, Benjamin Recht, "Exponential Stability Analysis via Integral Quadratic Constraints." Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. [arXiv]

Conference Proceedings

1. Arnab Maiti*, Ross Boczar*, Kevin Jamieson, Lillian J. Ratliff. "Near-Optimal Pure Exploration in Matrix Games: A Generalization of Stochastic Bandits & Dueling Bandits." AISTATS 2024. [arXiv]
2. Reilly Raab, Ross Boczar, Maryam Fazel, Yang Liu. "Fair Participation via Sequential Policies." AAAI 2024. [Link]
3. Stephen Tu*, Ross Boczar*, Benjamin Recht, "Minimax Lower Bounds for H-infinity-Norm Estimation." American Control Conference 2019. [arXiv]
4. Max Simchowitz* , Ross Boczar*, Benjamin Recht, "Learning a Marginally Stable System from One Trajectory." Conference on Learning Theory 2019. [arXiv]
5. Ross Boczar, Nikolai Matni, Benjamin Recht, "Finite-Data Performance Guarantees for the Output-Feedback Control of an Unknown System." IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2018. [arXiv]
6. Stephen Tu, Ross Boczar, Benjamin Recht, "On the Approximation of Toeplitz Operators for Nonparametric H-infinity-norm Estimation." American Control Conference 2018. [arXiv]
7. Stephen Tu, Ross Boczar, Max Simchowitz, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Benjamin Recht, "Low-rank Solutions of Linear Matrix Equations via Procrustes Flow." ICML 2016. [Link][arXiv]
8. Ross Boczar, Laurent Lessard, Benjamin Recht, "Exponential Convergence Bounds using Integral Quadratic Constraints." 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2015, Osaka, Japan. [Link][arXiv][Code]
9. James T. Hing, Ross Boczar, Kyle Hart, "Parking Autonomous Skids." Human Interface and the Management of Information: Information and Knowledge in Context. 17th International Conference, HCI International 2015, Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 2-7, 2015, Proceedings, Part II. [Link]
10. Larry Venetsky, Ross Boczar, and Robert Lee-Own, "Optimization of background subtraction for image enhancement," Proc. SPIE 8751, Machine Intelligence and Bio-inspired Computation: Theory and Applications VII, 875102 (May 28, 2013), doi:10.1117/12.2014319. [PDF]

* Equal contribution.

Technical Reports

1. Ross Boczar, "Performance Guarantees in Learning and Robust Control." PhD Dissertation, 2019. [Link]
2. Ross Boczar, Jason Suapengco, and Gabriel Torres, "AutoPlug: Open Architecture for Automotive Services," 2011. [Poster]

Other

1. Amy Calhoun, "AutoPlug: Plug-n-Play Comes to Automotive Technology," Penn Engineering Magazine, Fall 2011. [PDF]
2. Some patents...
3. Some talks...