David Mis
PhD Candidate
Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research
Rice University
Houston, TX, USA
[david.mis@rice.edu] [CV] [GitHub] [Google Scholar]
News
Upcoming — SIAM UQ
I am organizing a minisymposium with Nick Boffi titled Measure flows for Inverse Problems and Machine Learning (MS35, MS52, and MS68) at the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification to be held in Minneapolis from March 22–26, 2026.
I am thankful to SIAM for supporting my travel.
December 19, 2025 — Inverse Days
I just returned from Inverse Days in Helsinki, Finland. This was my second time attending, and both times it has been the highlight of my year.
With the help of my European friends and collaborators, particularly my friend and mentor Matti Lassas, I was able to map out my research program and goals for 2026. These projects will explore new connections between disparate areas of applied mathematics, and I am excited to share them in the coming months.
Just like last year, it was wonderful to reconnect with people I’d only met briefly before, and to finally meet in person several people I’d known only by name and through their work.
Somehow, I forgot to take even a single picture in Helsinki, so my memories will have to suffice.
December 12, 2025 — CBMS
I had the pleasure of attending the CBMS Conference on Research at the Interface of Applied Mathematics and Machine Learning (AMML) 2025 at the University of Houston. The highlight of the conference was a 10 lecture series by Lars Ruthotto on machine learning and AI. Lars is an outstanding presenter, and these lectures set a new standard for an introduction to machine learning throught the lens of applied mathematics. The lecture material and recordings are publicly available.
Additionally, I presented a poster on our ongoing work regarding measure flows in Bayes Hilbert spaces. For this poster, I had some time to experiment with an unorthodox “darkmode” color scheme. It received positive feedback. The printer did not reproduce the colors exactly as I intended, but I am happy with the result.
The poster was made with Beamer using the Gemini template; you can find my color scheme here. If you are thinking of using it for your own posters, please keep in mind the warnings at the bottom of the README.
I expect the preprint for this work to be available on arXiv early 2026.
October 23, 2025 — PhD proposal
I defended my PhD thesis proposal. Many thanks to my committee Drs. Beatrice Rivière, Anthony Várilly-Alvarado, and Maarten V. de Hoop.
Aug 2, 2025 — AIP
I have just returned from the Applied Inverse Problems conference in beautiful Rio de Janeiro. Many thanks to Matti Lassas, Giovanni Covi and Siiri Rautio for inviting me to speak in their minisymposium XAIP: Explainable algorithms for inverse problems. The 12 speakers approached this challenging area from many different directions. It is abundantly clear that creating interpretable and explainable approaches for scientific machine learning will continue to be one of the most important and difficult challenges in applied mathematics of our time.
April 30, 2025 — ICLR
I have returned from ICLR in Singapore, where Matti Lassas and I presented our poster on Semialgebraic Neural Networks.
I loved Singapore, and I ate kaya toast several times a day—probably too often, at the expense of other great food. But the highlight of the trip was spending time with Matti and Takashi Furuya, who presented multiple papers on measure-valued transformers and neural operators.
December 14, 2024 — Inverse Days
I had a fantastic time at Inverse Days in Oulu, Finland, where I presented our work on Semialgebraic Neural Networks. This was my first opportunity to travel internationally for an academic conference, and it was an absolute joy. I have the dubious distinction of being technically undefeated in the sport of walrus wrestling, with a record of 0–0 and 1 withdrawal due to a comical amount of bleeding.
Conference extracurriculars aside, it was great to finally meet mathematicians whose work I have read and learned from, including Mikko Salo and Samuli Siltanen. Also, the young researchers I met made me feel welcome beyond anything I expected. I hope this was just the first of many visits to see my friends and collaborators in Finland.
December 3, 2024 — Masters defense
I successfully defended my masters thesis. Many thanks to my committee Drs. Jesse Chan, Anthony Várilly-Alvarado, and Maarten V. de Hoop.