Computer Science Professor Gets Amazon Research Award

NEW YORK, NY (IANS) – Pavithra Prabhakar, an Indian American professor of computer science at Kansas State University, has received an Amazon Research Award to design a tool that minimizes negative user experiences.

Prabhakar, who is the Peggy and Gary Edwards chair in engineering, was one of 74 recipients of the awards from Amazon, which also includes an unrestricted gift, access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and Amazon Web Services’ artificial intelligence and machine learning services and tools.

The tool designed by Prabhakar would be utilized to minimize disruptive changes to user experience of machine learning-based software systems as the product is refined and retrained over time.

“The broad objective of the project is to automatically characterize how much two versions of machine learning-based systems are similar or different,” Prabhakar said.

Prabhakar obtained her doctorate in computer science and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by a Center for the Mathematics of Information postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.

She was named a Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone research scholar and received the dean’s award for excellence in research from the Carl R Ice College of Engineering.

Prabhakar’s research has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the NSF CAREER award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Union.