James Alcala
Biography
Dr. James K. Alcala is a Dornsife Teaching Fellow in Mathematics at USC. He teaches courses across the undergraduate curriculum in mathematics, with particular focus and interests in applied mathematics, optimization, analysis, linear algebra, machine learning/AI, data science, and related topics.
Dr. Alcala previously was a graduate and undergraduate student at UC Riverside, with a thesis focusing on optimization and various other projects in machine learning, data science, and computational social science. Currently, he is continuing work related to saddle point algorithms in optimization and is also supervising an undergraduate research group relating large language models, computational linguistics, and political science.
Education
- Ph.D. Mathematics, UC Riverside, 2024
- BS Univ Calif Riverside
-
Summary Statement of Research Interests
I’m an applied mathematician with interests and work spanning optimization, neural networks, machine learning, AI, data science, and computational social science.
Research Keywords
Optimization, Data Science, Machine Learning, AI
Detailed Statement of Research Interests
Dr. James Alcala received his PhD in 2024 from UC Riverside with a thesis in optimization. His doctoral work specifically focuses on accelerated algorithms for saddle point (a.k.a. minimax) problems and has applications in wide-ranging subfields of mathematics, engineering, and other sciences – including machine learning. Dr. Alcala also previously worked on a collaborative project related to neural collapse, an important phenomenon in the study of neural network classification. Finally, Dr. Alcala has also spent some time playing with and poking at large social media datasets using Python to better understand social media group dynamics and prevalence of linguistic practices in these groups, and is broadly very interested in computational linguistics and computational social science. He is currently working with undergraduate students here at USC to explore how large language models provide ‘neutral’ summaries to non-neutral political news pieces. For undergraduate students interested in working with Dr. Alcala, please send him a self-introduction email that includes information about yourself, your completed, current, and planned coursework, your math interests, and your goals.