Emmanuel Paalam

Emmanuel Paalam is an undergraduate student in Computer Science at the University of West Florida (UWF). He joined the Jalaian Lab under the supervision of Dr. Cohen and Dr. Jalaian in September 2024, and currently acts as a research assistant for the lab.

Emmanuel’s research focuses on improving the robustness of AI systems, in which he utilizes his knowledge in algorithm design and programming in the experimental design for projects involving AI performance optimization. Besides his foundational background in computer science, he is also a member of the University of West Florida’s Computational Statistics and Data Analytics Lab, having initially joined this lab as a research assistant under the supervision of Dr. Cohen before fully taking on classification-focused ML research for education analytics; there, he has exercised similar skillsets within more statistically-concerned research projects which involve machine learning. Relative to his work at the Jalaian Lab, meanwhile, he is interested in the capabilities of knowledge distillation, and is now exploring the Torchdistill methodology and its abilities as a more generalized, declarative interface for KD experimentation.

He enjoys listening to music, Angela Collier’s YouTube output, and the Rotten Mango true crime podcast in his free time. His favorite artists include Angel Olsen, Haley Blais, Kenshi Yonezu, HARU NEMURI, SOPHIE, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, JPEGMAFIA, Fiona Apple, and Shiina Ringo.