I am a PhD student at Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering (ECSE), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), working under the supervision of Prof. Ali Tajer. I am broadly interested in causal inference using observational and interventional data, especially in high-dimensional causal graphs.

I am a 2020 IBM AI Horizons Scholar as part of RPI-IBM AI Research Collaboration and working with Dr. Karthikeyan Shanmugam and Dr. Prasanna Sattigeri.

Before joining RPI, I received my Bachelor’s degree from Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Bogazici University in 2018.

Education

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, (2018-Present)
• M.Sc in Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2020
• B.Sc. in Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, 2018
• B.Sc. Exchange Student in Electrical & Computer Engineering, The University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2016

Publications

B. Varici, E. Acarturk, K. Shanmugam, A. Kumar, and A. Tajer, “Score-based Causal Representation Learning with Interventions ”, under review.

B. Varici, K. Shanmugam, P. Sattigeri, and A. Tajer, “Causal Bandits for Linear Structural Equation Models”, under review.

B. Varici, K. Shanmugam, P. Sattigeri, and A. Tajer, “Intervention Target Estimation in the Presence of Latent Variables”, Conference on Uncertainty in Artifical Intelligence (UAI), 2022.

B. Varici, K. Shanmugam, P. Sattigeri, and A. Tajer, “Scalable Intervention Target Estimation in Linear Models”, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.

B. Varici, S. Sihag, and A. Tajer, “Learning Shared Subgraphs in Ising Model Pairs”, in Proc. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2021.

Teaching

I have been a TA for the following courses at RPI:

• ECSE 1010: Introduction to ECSE (Fall 2018)
• ECSE 2610: Computer Components and Operations (Fall 2018, Spring 2019)
• ECSE 2410: Signals and Systems (Spring 2019, Spring 2020)