Bilal Siddiqui, Ph.D.

Bio

I began my journey at UTSA in 2013 as an undecided undergraduate with engineering
aspirations. During my sophomore year, I settled on Computer Science as a base to launch
my career due to its versatility and have never looked back. By 2017, I had completed my
B.S. in Computer Science and decided to pursue graduate studies. My doctoral studies
began in June 2018 with a Presidential Distinguished Research Fellowship (PDRF) award
from the Graduate School. After nearly six years of research, I concluded my Ph.D. in April
2024 with a dissertation that presented novel techniques for parameter reduction in neural
networks.

As part of my current appointment, I oversee the Graduate Certificate in Data Science
within the UC, where I also teach their Machine Learning and Data Science courses. When
it comes to teaching, I like to promote active learning, and I seek to encourage learning
through mistakes by providing multiple extra-credit activities per week (such as five-minute
lecture quizzes) to reinforce materials. In my opinion, questions are the silver bullet to
learning; they are how we explore and communicate in this simulation. It should be of no
surprise that I employ the Socratic method, and I find that it helps anchor students to their
class materials. I like to encourage discussions on problems because it often allows me to
nudge the class towards better reasoning for their answers. In my view, teaching and
research are two sides of the same coin, where teaching solidifies the known into
understanding and research is an exploration building oZ the former. Therefore, I think it’s
better to slowly learn with understanding than to blitz through potentially more material
without internalizing how to use and apply the knowledge.

I often think about intelligence, particularly its imitations in the form of Machine Learning
and how these imitations can be distilled into their simplest forms (parameter eZicient
neural nets - my research). When not researching, teaching, or learning, I like to investigate
the hows and whys of things, which may explain my hobbies of game development and film
analysis. I grew up watching and reading science fiction and found any material that had
“Star” in its title thrilling. These days, I gravitate more towards puzzle games like bitburner,
shenzen i/o, and occasionally TV shows - two I recently enjoyed, The Sandman and Three-
Body.