Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Computer Scientist Recipient of 2015 NAS William O. Baker Award

January 27th, 2015 / in awards / by Helen Wright

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Congratulations to Benjamin Recht, assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for receiving the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research in the field of statistics and machine learning.

From the website:

Recht is being honored for his significant contributions to the field of data science, an area of research that combines statistics (the analysis of large amounts of numerical data), computer science, and mathematics. A common problem in the modern world is that there is lots of data but it is usually incomplete. Recht’s work has been particularly valuable in a broad area of mathematics that uses assumptions to reconstruct data—matrix completion and nuclear normal minimization. His seminal papers on matrix completion, written with Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University, Maryam Fazel of the University of Washington and Pablo Parrilo of MIT, have been cited more than 2,000 times and have contributed to fields ranging from machine learning to astronomical imaging.

Formerly the National Academies of Science (NAS) Award for Initiatives in Research, the William O. Baker Award recognizes innovative young scientists and encourages research likely to lead toward new capabilities for human benefit. The award is given yearly to residents of the United States, preferably no older than 35 years of age. The recipient is awarded a $15,000 prize.

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