Michael Cardei

My name is Michael Cardei, and I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, advised by Professor Ferdinando Fioretto. I am a member of the RAISE Lab, where my research focuses on Constrained Generative AI, Diffusion Language Models, and Generative AI for science, engineering, and code generation. My work is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP).

I have been fortunate to gain research experience across national laboratory, industry, and academic settings. I am currently a Ph.D. Research Intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and in summer 2025 I was a Staff Machine Learning Research Intern at Visa, where I worked on generative AI for financial applications. Previously, I participated in the Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) program at Carnegie Mellon University focusing on computer vision for autonomous vehicles, and a summer REU at Wake Forest University, working on computer vision, machine learning privacy, and bias reduction in AI health settings. I received my B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Florida, where I also worked on large language models, federated learning, and explainable AI.