About Me
Hello everyone, welcome to my website!
My name is Donya, I am a Ph.D. candidate at TTIC (it's a wonderful place to focus on Machine Learning theory at UChicago) where I am fortunate to be advised by Avrim Blum. My research lies at the intersection of machine learning theory and theoretical computer science. I’m broadly interested in robustness, reliability, and explainability with provable guarantees, and in developing and applying algorithmic and statistical tools to study them. When I'm not thinking about very concrete research questions, I like philosophizing about the [not so well defined] higher-level related concepts, such as [the meaning and means of] trust and safety.
I have the pleasure of spending the summer of 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by Andrej Risteski, and at Columbia University, hosted by Daniel Hsu. I feel very fortunate for these opportunities.
"The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers," and I would be lying if I said I was patient enough during my undergrad. Back then, I worked as an intern in different places, from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, to the Max Planck Institute, Germany, under the supervision of Peter Benner, and the University of Texas at Austin, USA. I had the opportunity to get to know fantastic people from all around the world and work with them. I was fortunate to work on my Bachelor's Thesis under the supervision of
Keshav Pingali from the University of Texas at Austin.
I was the first (and hopefully not the last) Bachelor's student in my university who has officially done her thesis internationally.
Education
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Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, IL, USA
March 2024—June 2028 (Expected)
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer ScienceAdvised by Avrim Blum |
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Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, IL, USA
September 2022— June 2024
M.Sc. in Computer ScienceMentored by Nati Srebro GPA: 4.0/4.0 |
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University of Tehran, Iran
Sept. 2017—July 2022
B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering—CommunicationsGPA: Final year: 19.58/20.00 (Highest Distinctions) Minor in Computer Engineering |
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Farzanegan High School, Iran Sept. 2013—Jun. 2017
Diploma in Mathematics and Physics' DisciplineGPA: 20.00/20.00 |
Publications
Most of my publications have authors ordered alphabetically, indicated by (α–β), as is customary in theoretical computer science.
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Proofs as Explanations: Short Certificates for Reliable Predictions Avrim Blum, Steve Hanneke, Chirag Pabbaraju, Donya Saless(α–β) COLT 2025 |
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PAC Learning with Improvements Idan Attias, Avrim Blum, Keziah Naggita, Donya Saless, Dravyansh Sharma, and Matthew Walter(α–β) ICML 2025 |
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Regularized Robustly Reliable Learners and Instance Targeted Attacks Avrim Blum, Donya Saless(α–β) Under Submission |
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HyperNetVec: Fast and scalable hierarchical embedding for hypergraphs Sepideh Maleki, Donya Saless, Dennis P. Wall, Keshav Pingali NetSci-X 2022 |
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NetVec: A scalable hypergraph embedding system Sepideh Maleki, Donya Saless, Dennis P. Wall, Keshav Pingali ICML 2021 Workshop: Self-Supervised Learning for Reasoning and Perception |
Languages
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English, TOEFL iBT Total: 114, Reading: 28, Listening: 30, Speaking: 30, Writing: 26 Apr. 2021
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German, B2 |