Yasha Pushak

Principal Member of Technical Staff

Yasha Pushak

Yasha joined Oracle Labs as an intern in 2019 during the middle of his PhD in computer science and tenure as a Vanier Scholar at UBC’s Vancouver Campus.  He then returned to his PhD in 2020 while continuing to do research on machine learning explainability part time at Oracle Labs. Yasha now works full time on the automated machine learning with explainability (AutoMLx) team. Yasha's PhD research studied the fitness landscapes of automated algorithm configuration problems (a generalization of the hyper-parameter configuration problem that arises in AutoML). He showed that the problems contain patterns that can be exploited, thereby enabling the development of improved automated algorithm configuration procedures. During this time, Yasha was also the first Student Representative on the Board of Directors of CS-Can/Info-Can. Prior to his PhD, Yasha received a BSc with Honours in Computer Science and a BSc with Honours in Mathematics at UBC's Okanagan Campus. In the final year of his undergraduate degree, Yasha also co-founded the Canadian Undergraduate Computer Science Conference. 

Publications