Having just nished my Masters studies in Machine Learning at UCL, I am highly motivated to take the next step and

continue with a Ph.D study. My main interests include large-scale optimisation, matrix/tensor factorization, mathematical modelling and time series analysis. Currently, my research is focused on estimating sparse predictors, a topic that is related to feature selection and graphical model selection, and has many applications to various elds ranging from collaborative ltering, computer vision and medical imaging, among others. During the summer I have worked on my MSc Thesis (supervised by Prof. Massimiliano Pontil) titled "Optimisation using sparsity-inducing penalties" and the past few months we have worked on a research paper which presents and extends some of the results in the thesis. The aim of the paper, which we submitted to the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML, 2014) in January, is to derive more efcient regularization schemes which involve certain structured sparsity regularizers as developed recently in the work by Argyriou, Foygel and Srebro (2012), and Morales, Micchelli and Pontil (2010). Specically, we describe efcient methods for the computation of the regularizers as well as their proximity operators. Furthermore, we extend them to a matrix setting, which has applications in collaborative ltering and multitask learning. Our ndings indicate that these methods produce state-of-the art results on benchmarks based on real data. We are currently working on a journal paper to be submitted to the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) where we will delve deeper on the theoretical properties of those regularizers and provide extensive illustrations of their advantages on more real data sets. The key theoretical objectives include the computation of the oracle inequalities, derivation of their sub-gradient and statistical analysis. Taking into account this foundation, we are interested in exploring the extension to a multilinear setting where the goal is to learn a low rank tensor of parameters. This problem has not been well studied and has many direct applications on collaborative ltering and computer vision, where we can have extra available information, such as time or mood. This work would build upon the acclaimed work of Romera-Paredes and Pontil (2013). Being highly motivated to do research and having a strong background in mathematics and machine learning, I rmly believe that this is the optimal environment for me.