MIT Students Turn Theory into Practice with IBM Collaboration

Three former MIT graduate students and postdoc have found success in their careers after collaborating on research projects at the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab.

Srinivasan Arunachalam, Zhang-Wei Hong PhD '25, and Irene Ko PhD '24 all worked together to develop innovative solutions in AI and quantum computing during their time at MIT.

Hong's work focused on reinforcement learning, where he developed techniques to ground AI for more realistic applications. He applied his research to domains such as robotics, large language models (LLMs), and reinforcement learning for science.

Ko's research centered around trustworthy AI, with a focus on developing frontier-safe, robust, accurate, and fair AI. Her work was funded by MIT-IBM and allowed her to close the gap between development and real-world deployment.