Congratulations to Dr. Akshay Aravamudan!

Apr 1, 2025. MLRG member Akshay Aravamudan successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Tuesday, April 1, 2025, earning his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering. Aravamudan delivered an outstanding defense and successfully completed this important milestone.

Aravamudan’s dissertation, titled “Expressive and Interpretable User Engagement Prediction using Multivariate Survival Processes,” studied how to predict user engagement in information cascades, such as whether people will react to, share, or otherwise participate in the spread of online content. His work developed probabilistic and neural models that predict engagement across different observation periods and forecast horizons, while preserving interpretability about how users influence one another. The dissertation introduced DANTE, a discriminative probabilistic model for anytime user engagement prediction, and EXPEDITE, a more expressive neural extension that retains the interpretable structure of survival-process models. These contributions are important because they help make information-diffusion models both accurate and explainable, supporting applications such as social media analytics, marketing, political communication, and misinformation mitigation.

His dissertation represents the culmination of a thoughtful and sustained research effort, advancing MLRG’s work on interpretable machine learning models for understanding how people engage with information online.

Congratulations, Dr. Aravamudan, on this outstanding achievement!