CMU Statistics Professor Sivaraman Balakrishnan Receives Amazon Research Award

Carnegie Mellon University faculty member Sivaraman Balakrishnan has received an Amazon Research Award. The Indian American statistics professor is with the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. (cmu.edu photo)

India-West Staff Reporter

Carnegie Mellon University June 8 announced that Sivaraman Balakrishnan was among five of its faculty members to receive an Amazon Research Award.

Balakrishnan, professor of statistics in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, was joined by fellow Dietrich College faculty member David Danks, as well as Computer Science school faculty members Katerina Fragkiadaki, Ruben Martins and Heather Miller, who were fellowship recipients, the news release said.

Balakrishnan, Indian American assistant professor of statistics, will use the award to continue work on developing robust learning algorithms.

The push to quickly collect and label data and to rapidly train, evaluate and deploy models all with minimal human intervention has led to concerns that datasets are fraught with quality issues and that test data derived from the real world won’t have the same distribution as training data, it said.

The Amazon Research Awards provide funding, access to Amazon public datasets, and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning services and tools. Each award is intended to support one year of work for one to two graduate students or postdoctoral students with faculty supervision. Amazon provided 101 awards to recipients from 59 universities, it said.

“The 2020 Amazon Research Awards recipients represent a distinguished array of academic researchers who are pursuing research across areas such as machine learning algorithms and theory, fairness in AI, computer vision, natural language processing, edge computing and medical research,” said Bratin Saha, vice president of Amazon Web Services’ Machine Learning Services.

“We are excited by the depth and breadth of their proposals, as well as the opportunity to advance the science through strengthened connections among academic researchers, their institutions and our research teams,” Saha added.

Balakrishnan was most recently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley, having received his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University.