Carlos Guestrin has just been given the highest honor bestowed by the US government for early-career scientists and engineers, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). One of just 100 so named, Carlos will have the opportunity to meet President Obama to receive the award.
Although he is still early in his career, Carlos’ accomplishments and contributions to computer science and machine learning have already made a tremendous impact. His foundational research on the use of submodular functions in machine learning and optimization have been applied to a multitude of data-intensive problems, from lower-cost monitoring of water quality to healthier design of chairs.
Within the AI research community, Carlos is a major figure, a recent winner of the prestigious Computers and Thought Award, which will be formally presented at the IJCAI conference next week. In the popular press, Carlos last year was named by Popular Science to their Brilliant 10 best young scientists to watch. Carlos is also an accomplished painter, something that he put to good use to butter me up on one of my birthdays. ;-)
Congratulations, Carlos!
Peter Lee @ July 10, 2009
PBS has posted the video from its Nova ScienceNow segment on Luis von Ahn. Go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0401/04.html if you missed it on television. It’s not every day that one of our faculty members is referred to as a slacker…
Peter Lee @ July 6, 2009
Like any research project at CMU Computer Science, the CMU-Intel Claytronics Project publishes lots of papers in research conferences and journals. The project has also gotten more than its fair share of attention in the popular press as well as various blogs and websites. (See the news links on the project’s web page for some examples.)
But nothing has tickled me more than seeing Frank Markus’ “technologue” editorial on Claytronics in the July 2009 issue of Motor Trend magazine. In what has to be one of the most unique explanations of the potential impact of a CMU research project, Markus gushes,
If Princess Leia had broadcast her plea for help in pario, Obi-Wan, C-3PO, and Luke could have stroked her cinnabons.
You can read the entire article on Motor Trend’s website here.
More modestly, but just as satisfying, is seeing one of the project’s graduate students, Michael Ashley-Rollman (who I co-advise with Seth Goldstein) have his research poster at the PLDI conference get picked to compete in the ACM student research competition. Way to go, Michael!
Peter Lee @ July 3, 2009