Dayo Ntwari

Senior Computing Specialist

Areas of work

About me

Contact Details

Email: in the first instance please send all IT queries to ithelp@stats.ox.ac.uk

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Dr Shirley Xiaoqi Liu

Postdoctoral Researcher

About Me

I am a postdoc working with Professor Patrick Rebeschini. My research focuses on machine learning theory and statistical learning, with particular emphasis on heterogeneous data settings.

I have recently been working on two main problems: (i) designing and analysing algorithms for online learning where data arrives sequentially and evolves over time; (ii) I study the training dynamics of popular machine learning architectures such as neural networks and attention mechanisms, particularly how they behave under challenging conditions like non-stationarity, contamination, and distribution shifts. I am especially interested in understanding phenomena such as benign overfitting, early stopping, and in-context learning with data heterogeneity.

I completed my PhD at Cambridge in 2024, where I was advised by Professor Ramji Venkataramanan. My PhD work centered on information theory and statistical learning, motivated by fundamental questions such as: Given a complex statistical estimation problem, what is the minimal amount of data we need to estimate the underlying signal? Can we design polynomial-time, mathematically-principled algorithms that approach the minimum?

Research Interests

  • Data heterogeneity: non-stationarity, contamination, and distribution shifts
  • General first-order methods, e.g., gradient descent, approximate message passing
  • Online learning and bandits
  • Information theory and communication systems

Publications

Contact Details

Email: shirley.liu@stats.ox.ac.uk

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Pronouns: she/her

Research Groups

Learning theory

Dr Joost Jorritsma

Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Research Fellow

I am a Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Research Fellow at the Department of Statistics, and Senior Demy at Magdalen College. Before arriving to Oxford, I have obtained a PhD in Probability Theory from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, and I did a postdoc at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. My main research interests is on random graph models and random processes taking place on these networks, inspired by real-world phenomena such as disease spreading. 

Contact Details

Email: joost.jorritsma@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office: Department of Statistics, 3.05

Pronouns: He/him/his

Research Groups

Groups

Dr Samvida S. Venkatesh

Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow

About Me

I completed a DPhil in Genomic Medicine and Statistics at the University of Oxford in 2024, where I applied statistical genetics to study metabolic and endocrine diseases in large-scale population biobanks such as UK Biobank. Prior to coming to Oxford, I did an undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology (with a minor in Computer Science) at Princeton University, USA.

Research Interests

I currently work on triangulating statistical and machine learning methods to interpret the effects of non-coding genetic variation on both molecular and systemic human phenotypes. 

Publications

Contact Details

Email: samvida.venkatesh@stats.ox.ac.uk

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Research Groups

Statistical Genetics and Epidemiology

David Janz

Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Fellow in Statistics

I design and analyse bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms, and develop the theoretical foundations of statistics and machine learning, particularly in the context of sequential decision-making (e.g. medical trials where continuation decisions are made adaptively).

Before this position, I worked with Csaba Szepesvári at the University of Alberta. I completed my PhD at Cambridge, supervised by José Miguel Hernández-Lobato and Zoubin Ghahramani. My career began at Oxford, where I read Engineering, Economics, and Management.

If you're considering a PhD/DPhil in machine learning theory at Oxford, feel free to email me.

 

Selected works

Abeille, Marc, David Janz, and Ciara Pike-Burke. "When and why randomised exploration works (in linear bandits)." Outstanding Paper Award, International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (2025).

Janz, David, et al. "Exploration via linearly perturbed loss minimisation." Oral Presentation, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (2024).

Lin, Jihao Andreas, et al. "Sampling from Gaussian process posteriors using stochastic gradient descent." Oral Presentation, International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (2023)

 

 

Contact Details

Email: david.janz@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office: 1.06

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