Every year at this time, Microsoft Research recognizes outstanding new faculty members — nominated by their universities as the best and brightest in their fields. This year’s class of Faculty Fellows — with interests spanning economics and game theory, bioelectronics, sustainability, healthcare, computer vision, computer security, etc. — was announced moments ago at the annual MSR Faculty Summit here in Redmond:
Maria Florina Balcan
Georgia Institute of Technology
Assistant Professor
School of Computer Science
Maria Florina Balcan is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Avrim Blum. From October 2008 until July 2009, she was a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New England. Her main research interests are computational and statistical machine learning, computational aspects in economics and game theory, and algorithms. She is a recipient of the Carnegie Mellon University SCS Distinguished Dissertation Award and the National Science Foundation NSF CAREER Award.
Krishnendu Chatterjee
IST Austria
Assistant Professor
Krishnendu is interested in graph games that arise in the formal verification of systems, and has deep connections with logic and automata theory. He established many fundamental results related to stochastic games on graphs, and is currently working on quantitative graph games and its application to synthesis of correct systems. He got his PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and his thesis won the David Sakrison Memorial Prize and Ackermann Award.
Jure Leskovec
Stanford University
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Jure Leskovec is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on the analysis and modeling of large social and information networks as the study of phenomena across the social, technological, and natural worlds. Problems he investigates are motivated by large scale data, the Web and Social Media. Jure received his PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008 and spent a year at Cornell University. His work received six best paper awards, won the ACM KDD cup and topped the Battle of the Sensor Networks competition.
Alistair McEwan
The University of Sydney
Lecturer of Computer Engineering
School of Electrical and Information Engineering
Alistair McEwan’s work aims to solve major health issues with technology, and involves research in the emerging field of bioelectronics—the interaction between electronics and biology. His current investigation of the electrode–skin interface aims to improve emergency diagnosis of heart attack and stroke as well as long-term monitoring of cardiovascular disease. He also works on related projects in electrical-impedance imaging systems, microelectronic circuits and systems, and neuromorphic engineering.
Shwetak Patel
University of Washington
Assistant Professor
Departments of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering
Shwetak Patel’s research is at the intersection of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction. His research focuses on building easy-to-deploy and practical sensing systems for the home. His work is being applied to sustainability, elder care, home safety, and the creation of new approaches for natural user interfaces. Many of his techniques use the existing utilities infrastructure as a “sensor,” thereby reducing the need for additional instrumentation. In one example, Patel has developed techniques for energy and water monitoring that provide a detailed breakdown of consumption in the home through monitoring a single point on the utility infrastructure. Through these new sensing approaches, Patel envisions the ability to instrument homes easily with smart technology for high-value applications.
Anderson de Rezende Rocha
University of Campinas
Assistant Professor
Institute of Computing
Prof. Rocha’s research interests include digital image and video forensics, computer vision, pattern analysis, and machine intelligence—focused on the field of digital document forensics. He seeks solutions for problems regarding collection, organization, and classification of digital evidence that is used by law enforcement agencies in Brazil and abroad. He is investigating how to reduce the misuse of important evidence and is working on digital categorization solutions to reduce the technical effort that is required to analyze each piece of evidence. Prof. Rocha’s work emphasizes tracking the source of the evidence, new techniques for establishing authenticity, and exposing possible tampering.
Keith Noah Snavely
Cornell University
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Noah Snavely is interested in using massive collections of images on the web to better understand and visualize our world. His research builds new computer-vision algorithms for scalable 3-D reconstruction, new graphics techniques for experiencing places through online photos, and new ways to enable communities of photographers to capture useful image collections. His software is being used by educators, artists, and scientists across a range of disciplines.
Brent Waters
University of Texas
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Sciences
Brent Waters studies cryptography and computer security. His research is laying the foundations for a new vision of encryption called Functional Encryption. Instead of encrypting to individual users, in a Functional Encryption system, one can embed any access predicate into the cipher text itself. In addition, he is interested in understanding the foundational underpinnings of cryptography and in developing security primitives that are both practical and provably secure.
The 2011 class joins a highly prestigious group of Faculty Fellows dating back to 2005, recognized and rewarded as the very best young computing research faculty from around the world.
Congratulations to Maria, Krishnendu, Jure, Alistair, Shwetak, Anderson, Keith, and Brent — truly the future leaders of our field!
Google Research Awards Deadline is Aug. 1
By the way, Google sponsors a similar program — called the Google Research Awards — that provides funding to full-time faculty working on research in areas of mutual interest with the company. I missed the most recent announcement: in June, Google named 112 awardees across 21 different focus areas. Be sure to take a look at the full list of winners.
If you are interested in applying for the next round of Google Research Awards, visit the application website today. The deadline is just around the corner — Monday, Aug. 1, 2011.
(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)
