James Sharpnack
4087 1/2 Mississippi St.
San Diego, CA 92104 U.S.A.
Phone: 614-406-2350
Email: jsharpna@gmail.com
url: http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~jsharpna/
Research Interests
Machine learning, High-dimensional statistics, Signal processing over graphs
Education
2007-2013
Ph.D. Machine Learning and Statistics
Carnegie Mellon University
Thesis: Graph Structured Normal Means Inference
Advisors: Aarti Singh, Alessandro Rinaldo
2002-2007
B.S. Mathematics and B.S. Physics
The Ohio State University
With distinction in Traditional Mathematics and specialization in Biophysics
Professional Positions
2013-2015
2009-2013
2008-2010
2007-2009
Post-doctoral researcher
Mathematics Department, University of California, San Diego
Graduate research assistant
Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Actuarial research intern
Travelers Indemnity Co., Hartford, CT
Teaching assistant
Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
Research Publications
Submitted Papers
2014
James Sharpnack, Ery Arias-Castro. “Exact Asymptotics for the Scan Statistic and Fast
Alternatives”, Submitted to The Annals of Statistics. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/
abs/1409.7127
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2014
2014
2014
James Sharpnack, Alessandro Rinaldo, Aarti Singh. “Detecting Anomalous Activity on Networks with the Graph Fourier Scan Statistic”, Submitted to Transactions on
Signal Processing (with Revision). Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.7217
Yu-Xiang Wang, James Sharpnack, Ryan Tibshirani, and Alex Smola. “Trend
Filtering on Graphs”, Submitted to the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
and Statistics (AIStats). Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7690
James Sharpnack and Mladen Kolar. “Mean and variance estimation in highdimensional heteroscedastic models with non-convex penalties”, Submitted to the Journal of Machine Learning Research., Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7874
Peer-Reviewer Papers
2013
2013
2013
2013
2013
2013
2012
2012
2010
James Sharpnack, Akshay Krishnamurphy, Aarti Singh. “Near-optimal Anomaly
Detection in Graphs using Lovasz Extended Scan Statistic”, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)
James Sharpnack, Alessandro Rinaldo, Aarti Singh. “Changepoint Detection over
Graphs with the Spectral Scan Statistic”, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AIStats), JMLR WCP, 31, p. 545–553
James Sharpnack, Akshay Krishnamurphy, Aarti Singh. “Detecting Activations
over Graphs using Spanning Tree Wavelet Bases”, International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence and Statistics (AIStats), JMLR WCP, 31, p. 536–544
Akshay Krishnamurphy, James Sharpnack, Aarti Singh. “Recovering GraphStructured Activations using Adaptive Compressive Measurements”, IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (Asilomar). (Winner of the Best Student
Paper Award)
James Sharpnack and Aarti Singh. “Near-optimal and Computationally Efficient
Detectors for Weak and Sparse Graph-Structured Patterns”, IEEE Global Conference on
Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
James Sharpnack. “A Path Algorithm for Localizing Anomalous Activity in Graphs”,
IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
James Sharpnack, Alessandro Rinaldo, Aarti Singh. “Sparsistency of the Edge
Lasso over Graphs”, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
(AIStats), JMLR WCP, 22, p. 1028–1036
Mladen Kolar and James Sharpnack. “Variance Function Estimation in Highdimensions”, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). p. 1447–1454
James Sharpnack and Aarti Singh. “Identifying graph-structured activation patterns
in networks”, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). (with Oral Presentation)
Professional Activities
Paper Reviewer
2014
Annals of Statistics, IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), IEEE Transactions on
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2013
2012
2011
Neural Networks and Learning Systems, International Conference on Machine Learning
(ICML)
Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Internation Conference on Machine
Learning (ICML)
IEEE Signal Processing Letters
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AIStats)
Invited Speaker
2014
2014
2014
2014
2013
2013
Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Internation Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference, Riverside, CA
Department of Informatics, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA
Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Workshop, San Diego, CA
IMS New Researchers Conference, Montreal, Quebec
Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Workshop, San Diego, CA
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