Zack Ankner

Research Assistant at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Zack Ankner is a Research Assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specifically within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He has been with CSAIL since August 2020, focusing on machine learning, particularly deep learning, and full-stack web development. His research contributions include developing a zero-shot model for generating topic-oriented summaries, which achieved state-of-the-art performance in his field.1

Education and Background

Zack Ankner is currently an undergraduate student at MIT, studying Computer Science and Mathematics. He began his studies at MIT in 2021 after completing his education at Milton Academy, where he graduated in 2020. During his time at MIT, he has been actively involved in various research projects and has held positions in different labs, including the Programming Systems Group and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley's lab.1 3

Research Interests

Ankner's research interests revolve around improving large language models (LLMs) through empirical investigations and modeling changes. He has worked on neural filtering techniques for LLM pre-training and dynamic inference methods to enhance model performance. His work includes exploring simple yet effective modeling ideas that can yield significant performance improvements without the complexity often found in more intricate solutions.3

Professional Experience

Research Assistant, MIT CSAIL (August 2020 - Present)
- Developed a zero-shot topic-oriented summarization model.
Chief Technology Officer, Nook Storage, Inc. (August 2019 - February 2020)
Research Scientist Intern, MosaicML (June 2022 - Ongoing)
- Focused on improving LLM performance through various techniques and experiments.1 2

Achievements

Ankner has received recognition for his work, including winning the Amazon award at McHacks6 for a project called SurfChat, which facilitated communication among users on the same webpage during a hackathon in 2019.1 4

For more details about his work and contributions, you can find him on platforms like LinkedIn under the username zack-ankner.