Grigory Yaroslavtsev

Grigory Yaroslavtsev is a Russian-American computer scientist. He is an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University. Previously he was an assistant professor of computer science at Indiana University and the founding director of the Center for Algorithms and Machine Learning (CAML) at Indiana University.

Early education
Yaroslavtsev was born in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, in 1987. Through 2002, Yaroslavtsev attended the St. Petersburg Classical Gymnasium, a gymnasium focused on the classics with core subjects of Latin and Ancient Greek, English, German, and mathematics. Yaroslavtsev next attended Physics and Technology School in St. Petersburg, a high school founded by Zhores Alferov, the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. There he was supported by a Siemens Fellowship and graduated in 2004. Yaroslavtsev entered the Physics and Technology Department at St. Petersburg Polytechnic University with the first result on the entry exam, and completed his B.S. in 2008.

In 2010, Yaroslavtsev received his M.S. from St. Petersburg Academic University as the first student in a theoretical computer science pilot program. The pilot program was founded by faculty at the St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences. Yaroslavtsev's masters thesis was supervised by Edward Hirsch, the Acting Head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Logic at the Steklov Institute.

Competitive programming
Yaroslavtsev was active through 2011 in international programming competitions. He was one of 24 world finalists in algorithms in the 2010 TopCoder Open competition and is a member of the TCO hall of fame. Yaroslavtsev also coached the high school team of the Physics and Technology School in 2009, when the team placed first in St. Petersburg.

Career
Yaroslavtsev completed his Ph.D. in computer science in three years in 2013 at Pennsylvania State University, advised by Sofya Raskhodnikova. His dissertation was titled Efficient Combinatorial Techniques in Sparsification, Summarization and Testing of Large Datasets. His research received the Best Graduate Research Award at the CSE Department. After an ICERM institute postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, he joined the University of Pennsylvania in the first cohort of fellows at the Warren Center for Network and Data Science, founded by Michael Kearns.

In 2016, Yaroslavtsev joined the faculty at Indiana University in the Department of Computer Science and founded the Center for Algorithms and Machine Learning (CAML). He held a secondary appointment in the Department of Statistics at Indiana University. He received the Facebook Faculty Research Award in 2017. Yaroslavtsev held a visiting position at the Alan Turing Institute in 2019. In 2021, he joined the faculty at George Mason University in the Department of Computer Science. In 2023-2024 he held a visiting faculty position at Stanford University.

Yaroslavtsev is best known for his work on representation learning and optimization in AI, massively parallel computing and algorithms for big data,  clustering analysis including correlation clustering, and privacy in network analysis and targeted search.

Other work
Yaroslavtsev led the development of AI at Lunchclub in 2020-2021.

Personal life
Yaroslavtsev is married to Katherine Roelofs. He is a competitive age-group triathlete, representing Team USA in the 2019 Ponteverdra ITU Long Distance Triathlon World Championships.