My name is Anastasios Kyrillidis (Αναστάσιος Κυριλλίδης), but most people call me Tasos (Τάσος). I am a Noah Harding Associate Professor, Dean Fellow in AI/Computing at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, and Ken Kennedy Institute Fellow at Rice University.
Prior to joining Rice, I was a Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (NY) and a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Member at the University of Texas at Austin. I received my PhD from the Computer Science Department at EPFL (Switzerland).
I am the recipient of a NSF CAREER Award, an Amazon Research Award, a Microsoft Research Award, and the Career Champion Award for the Class of 2025 at Rice University. Our team QuantumForGraphproblem (QuanTAS), led by Jianqiang Li, placed as a finalist (7th out of 133 teams) in the XPRIZE Quantum Applications competition.
My research develops theory and algorithms at the intersection of optimization and modern machine learning. Current directions include:
- Optimization for machine learning: Convergence theory for convex and nonconvex algorithms, adaptive methods, and momentum-based techniques.
- Efficient large-scale AI: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA), KV cache compression, subnetwork training, and low-precision methods for LLMs and large models.
- Mixture of Experts: Provable feature learning dynamics and routing mechanisms for scalable architectures.
- Quantum computing and optimization: Variational quantum eigensolvers, continuous relaxations for combinatorial problems (SAT, Max-K-Cut).
- AI for science: Protein crystallography, machine learning force fields, and computational biology.
- Federated and distributed learning: Communication-efficient, adaptive, and asynchronous methods with provable guarantees.
Contact: anastasios@rice.edu
Teaching
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COMP 282 - Computational Methods in AI (Spring ‘26, Fall ‘26)
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COMP 545 - Advanced topics in optimization: From simple to complex ML systems (Spring ‘19, Spring ‘20)
- COMP 414/514 - Optimization: Algorithms, Complexity & Approximations (Fall ‘19, Fall ‘20, Fall ‘21)
- COMP 182 - Algorithmic Thinking (Spring ‘23)
Old notes on various stuff
Funding sources
My research is supported by NSF FET:Small no. 1907936, NSF MLWiNS CNS no. 2003137 (in collaboration with Intel), NSF CMMI no. 2037545, NSF CAREER Award no. 2145629, NSF EFRI BEGIN OI no. 2515431, Welch Foundation Research Grant no. 964181, Amazon Research Award, Microsoft Research Award, and Rice InterDisciplinary Excellence Award (IDEA).