About me

Hello! I’m Ziyao (Richard) Cui, a first-year PhD in Operations Research at MIT, advised by Prof. Rahul Mazumder. My research focuses on the mechanics and applications of model compression, particularly knowledge distillation and pruning. I study how compression alters core model behaviors like privacy and uncertainty, and develop methods that leverage these compressed models to efficiently guide large-scale data selection.

Prior to MIT, I earned my Bachelor’s degree from Duke University, double-majoring in Computer Science (AI/ML concentration) and Statistical Science (Data Science concentration), with a minor in Economics. During my time at Duke, I was advised by Prof. Jian Pei and Prof. Cynthia Rudin.

You can find my Google Scholar page here and CV here.