Honors for Carnegie Mellon University’s Rising Star in the Field of Artificial Intelligence

Maria Florina Balcan, an associate professor in School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has received the 2019 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. This award is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year for significant innovations in machine learning and minimally supervised learning. The award includes a $35,000 prize.

Dr. Balcan’s research interests include learning theory, machine learning, artificial intelligence, theory of computing, algorithmic economics, and algorithmic game theory, and optimization.

In announcing the award for Dr. Balcan, Cherri M. Pancake, president of the Associaton for Computing Machinery, stated that “although she is still in the early stages of her career, she has already established herself as the world leader in the theory of how AI systems can learn with limited supervision. More broadly, her work has realigned the foundations of machine learning, and consequently ushered in many new applications that have brought about leapfrog advances in this exciting area of arti!cial intelligence.”

Dr. Balcan holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Bucharest in Romania. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.