Sunay Bhat Home

My Story

I was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee... Go Vols! As a competitive junior and collegiate tennis player, I played in national and international tournaments and was a proud member of the UT men's tennis team from 2013-2017. Tennis was an integral part of my early life and I believe the lessons and experiences that come from competitive sports and team dynamic are invaluable. I graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering, after which I spent three years working in defense at Lockheed Martin Santa Barbara Focalplane as a Test and then Systems Engineer. Since moving to California, I became an avid surfer and picked up hiking/backpacking, snowboarding, and all sorts of activities that keep outside. I am always looking for the next interesting read in macroeconomics, behavioral science, and policy.

I returned to graduate school fall of 2020 to join UCLA's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department as an MS/PhD student. I chose to focus on research of AI applications in dynamic environments at the human machine interface. Now more than ever, it is clear the algorithms and decision-making software we deploy in the real-world cannot be the black boxes. The choices made from writing the first lines of code have downstream consequences that are incredibly hard to predict. I believe a cross-disciplinary, holistic approach is needed to better understand these consequences and design AI applications that add more value to the human experience than they extract. Like many of the broader issues we face today, these are complex problems with complex solutions, and pretending otherwise limits our capacity to find the nuanced solutions we need.

Community and Causes

During my time at UT, I lost a close friend, and my team lost a member, who battled a rare pediatric cancer while still competing and inspiring a program and tennis community at large. The Sean Karl Foundation, started by Sean's family and friends in his memory, works to bring awareness and raise money for research into Ewing's Sarcoma and other rare pediatric cancers. See the link below to read more about the foundation, donation opportunities, and upcoming events.

Sean Karl Foundation

A 501(c)(3) non-profit in remembrance of Sean Karl dedicated to funding Ewing's Sarcoma research.

Learn more

Quotes

"To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believeable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful."
- Edward R. Murrow

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most brilliant man if he if firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
- Leo Tolstoy

“The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in life is change.”
- Dan Gilbert