CSAIL principal investigators Aleksander Madry and Ankur Moitra are two of 11 at MIT to be among 126 American and Canadian researchers awarded the 2016 Sloan Research Fellowships, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today.
Spanning 52 colleges and universities and awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships “have become an unmistakable marker of quality among researchers,” said Paul L. Joskow, president of the foundation, in a press release. “Fellows represent the best-of-the-best among young scientists.”
Madry is the NBX career development assistant professor of computer science at MIT. His research centers on algorithmic problems motivated by real-world optimization, mainly the design and analysis of very efficient approximation algorithms for fundamental graph problems.
Madry received his PhD in computer science from MIT and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. His work has been recognized with a variety of awards, including the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, the George M. Sprowls Doctoral Dissertation Award, and a number of best paper awards.
One of Moitra’s main research interests is to give algorithms with provable guarantees for various problems in machine learning. He has worked in numerous areas of algorithms, such as approximation and dueling algorithms and smoothed analysis, and diverse topics covering statistical inference, optimization, and combinatorics. He is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and Google Research Award.
Moitra received his BS in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell, and completed his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from MIT, advised by Tom Leighton. He received best thesis awards for both his doctoral and master's dissertations. After two years as an NSF CI Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Moitra returned to MIT as a CSAIL researcher and assistant professor in applied mathematics.
Madry and Moitra receive research fellowship from Sloan Foundation
