Nicholas J. Cooper

Co-founder · nick@combinatoriallabs.com

Portrait of Nicholas J. Cooper

Nicholas Cooper --- a computer scientist, mathematician, and musician --- has been investigating the fundamentals of deep neural networks since he was 15 years old. He started this journey by writing his own deep learning framework in high school and hasn't looked back.

Along the way, he has worked on synthetic data generation, audio transformation, real-time video, knowledge distillation, and more. Now, his efforts are focused on building next generation neural networks using powerful new theoretical foundations for deep learning.

  • NeurREPS · 2025

    Logit Losses Limit the Effectiveness of Feature Knowledge Distillation

    Enhanced feature knowledge distillation by training backbones without low-dimensional ground truth loss. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14981

  • Software Engineer at C360 Technologies · 2023

    Ultra High-res Denoiser

    Novel calibration technique for reducing noise in very high resolution (12k+) video cameras.

  • Rutgers University Capstone Project · 2020

    Quantitative Understanding and Machine Learning Modeling of Vacuum Tubes for Guitar Amplification

    Custom neural networks for real-time modeling the non-linear dynamics of vacuum tubes operating past the saturation point.

  • Research Internship at Igolgi INC · 2019

    Synthetic Data for Object Detection

    Training data synthesis for areal object detection models.

  • Rutgers WINLAB Summer Internship · 2018

    Real Time Composition Suggestions with Sequential Neural Networks

    Custom self-assembling neural network sequences for dynamic music composition.