About Me


My name is Olawale (Wale) Salaudeen, and I am an postdoctoral associate at MIT in the Healthy ML Lab, led by Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi. Prior to my postdoc, I earned a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) Lab at Stanford University, advised by Sanmi Koyejo. I am honored to have received a Sloan Scholarship, Beckman Graduate Research Fellowship, GEM Associate Fellowship, and an NSF Miniature Brain Machinery Traineeship. Additionally, I am fortunate to have interned at Sandia National Laboratories, Google Brain, Cruise LLC, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

Before Illinois, I received a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Texas A&M University.

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in reliable and trustworthy machine learning. My research goal is to improve the robustness of machine learning models for real-world decision-making. Particularly, I aim to develop the principles and practices of robust generalization, adaptation, and evaluation in machine learning. Additionally, I am interested in diverse applications, including neuroscience/neuroimaging, healthcare, and algorithmic fairness. My experience and interests span generative AI, statistical machine learning, multi-modal deep learning, domain adaptation/generalization, causality-inspired machine learning, and probabilistic graphical models.

I am very happy to discuss new research directions; please reach out if there is shared interest!

Mentorship

I am happy to mentor students at MIT with overlapping research interests. Particularly for undergrads, programs like UROP are a great mechanism for mentorship. More generally, I am very happy and available to give advice and feedback on applying to and navigating both undergraduate and graduate programs in computer science and related disciplines – especially for those to whom this type of feedback and guidance would be otherwise unavailable.

You can reach me at [full firstname] [at] mit [dot] edu.

Selected Recent News

  • Fall 2024. I joined the Healthy ML Lab, led by Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi, at MIT as a postdoctoral associate!
  • Summer 2024. I successfully defended my PhD dissertation titled “Towards External Valid Machine Learning: A Spurious Correlations Perspective”!
  • Spring 2024. I gave a talk on AI for critical systems at the MobiliT.AI forum (May 28-29)!
  • Spring 2024. I gave a talk at UIUC Machine Learning Seminar on the external validity of ImageNet; artifacts here!
  • Spring 2024. Recent work demonstrating the external validity of ImageNet model/architecture rankings – ImageNot: A contrast with ImageNet preserves model ranking – is now available on arXiv!
  • Winter 2024. 2 papers on machine learning under distribution shift will appear at AISTATS 2024 (see Publications)!
  • Winter 2024. I have returned to Stanford from MPI!
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Previous Mentees