Max Hartman

Hi, I’m Max Hartman, an MS student at the UIUC ECE department, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Minh N. Do. Previously, I completed my BS at UIUC in Computer Engineering, advised by Prof. Lav R. Varshney. In Summer 2026, I will be an Applied Research Scientist intern at Meta, working on LLMs for Comment Ranking. Previously, I was a software development engineer intern at Amazon (Summer 2025).

My research interests are centered on AI Safety, Efficiency, and Privacy in Large Language Models and Vision Language Models. My primary goal is to move the field beyond empirical heuristics by establishing theoretically grounded frameworks that explain the underlying mechanisms of model behavior. I enjoy conducting experimental work to motivate algorithmic improvements justified by theoretical results. I often enjoy using tools from Information and Control Theory.