Ollie Liu

I’m a second-year Ph.D student in Computer Science at University of Southern California, fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Dani Yogatama and Prof. Willie Neiswanger. In life, my friends call me Oliver 🫒

I’m passionate about designing multimodal foundation models that accelerate scientific discovery. Towards this, my research foci include foundation model pre-training, understanding and exploring their capabilities, as well as continual training to align them with human desiderata. By focusing on these areas, I aim to develop trustworthy models that not only advance artificial intelligence but also serve practical purposes in various scientific domains.

Before USC, I was a researcher in continuous optimization with Prof. Jorge Nocedal at Northwestern University. Even before that, I did my B.S+M.S at Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in machine learning.

At USC, I co-lead the AI Safety Club, a student-run organization that advocates for safety in advanced AI systems. We run semester-long curriculums in introductory topics and technical areas.