Lei Le
Senior AI / Machine Learning Engineer at LinkedIn
Previously a scientist and engineer at Amazon and Google Research. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington and work across AI, machine learning, optimization, reinforcement learning, and large-scale AI systems.
Building AI systems from research ideas to real-world applications.
I work across research and production, with a focus on building AI and machine learning systems that connect ideas from research to real-world applications. This site brings together my background, selected publications, and a writing space for technical notes, project reflections, and ideas in progress.
About
I work at the intersection of AI research, machine learning, and production systems.
I am a senior AI / machine learning engineer at LinkedIn. Before joining LinkedIn, I was an applied scientist at Amazon. Before that, I interned at Google Research / Google AI.
I received my PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington, where I worked with Prof. Martha White. My interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistical learning, non-convex optimization, and reinforcement learning.
Writing
Technical notes, project reflections, and research-related writing.
A writing space in progress
This section is reserved for future essays, technical notes, and project reflections on AI, machine learning, and engineering. New writing will appear here over time.
Selected Publications
A few papers spanning representation learning, reinforcement learning, and large-scale ranking systems.
- Borisyuk, Fedor, et al. LiRank: Industrial Large Scale Ranking Models at LinkedIn. Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024. [PDF]
- Farzane Aminmansour, Andrew Patterson, Lei Le, Yisu Peng, Daniel Mitchell, Franco Pestilli, Cesar Caiafa, Russell Greiner and Martha White. Learning Macroscopic Brain Connectomes via Group-Sparse Factorization. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2019. [PDF]
- Vincent Liu, Raksha Kumaraswam, Lei Le, and Martha White. The utility of sparse representations for control in reinforcement learning. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2019. [PDF]
- Lei Le, Andrew Patterson, and Martha White. Supervised autoencoders: Improving generalization performance with unsupervised regularizers. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), pages 107-117, 2018. [PDF]
- Lei Le and Martha White. Identifying global optimality for dictionary learning. [PDF]
- Lei Le, Raksha Kumaraswamy, and Martha White. Learning sparse representations in reinforcement learning with sparse coding. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-17, pages 2067–2073, 2017. [PDF]
- Lei Le and Martha White. Global optimization of regularized factor models using alternating minimization. In 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2016), Advances in Non-convex Analysis and Optimization Workshop, New York City, NY, June 2016.
- Lei Le, Emilio Ferrara, and Alessandro Flammini. On predictability of rare events leveraging social media: A machine learning perspective. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN’15), Palo Alto, CA, November 2015. [PDF]
Experience
Industry and research roles across AI engineering, machine learning, applied science, and academic research.
- 2022.2 - present, Senior AI / Machine Learning Engineer at LinkedIn.
- 2019.8 - 2022.2, Applied Scientist at Amazon.
- 2018.9 - 2018.12, Intern at Google, Research and Machine Intelligence Team.
- 2015.8 - 2019.5, Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University Bloomington.
- 2013.9 - 2015.5, Associate Instructor, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University Bloomington.
Education
Academic training in computer science and management science.
- 2013.8 - 2019.6, PhD in Computer Science, Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA.
- 2010.9 - 2013.3, Master of Management Science, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
- 2006.9 - 2010.6, Bachelor of Management Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Contact
The easiest ways to reach me or find more of my work.
| some.other.lei %A%T gmail %D%O%T com | |
| www.linkedin.com/in/leile26/ | |
| Blog | leile26.github.io/blog/ |
Others
A few things I enjoy outside of work.
I love soccer, basketball and baseball. In my spare time, I watch games and play them. I also like playing the guitar, video games, and reading books and manga.