Eight faculty members affiliated with the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) have received tenure awards or promotions. These appointments are awaiting approval from the Board of Regents and will become effective Aug. 15, 2019.

“ML@GT is stronger because of the immense amount of talent that our faculty bring to the community. We are thrilled that each of these faculty members are being recognized for their hard work and commitment to not only their research, but to investing in the next generation of machine learning and artificial intelligence pioneers,” said Irfan Essa, ML@GT director.

Karen Liu was promoted to full professor and is already tenured. An integral part of the ML@GT community, Liu’s home school is the School of Interactive Computing. She co-founded DART alongside her students, which won the Grand Prize of Open Source Software World Challenge in 2016. Liu also received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and was named to the Young Innovators Under 35 List by Technology Review.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and focuses on robotics and computer graphics, including optimal control, physics-based animation, computational biomechanics, and reinforcement learning. She is the Program Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2019.

Dhruv Batra was promoted to associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing and received tenure. Batra is also a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Batra’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and natural language processing. Featured in Fortune, MIT Technology Review, Slate, and more, Batra is an emerging leader in his craft. Batra earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010.

Devi Parikh received tenure and was promoted to the position of associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing. Parikh joined Georgia Tech in 2016 and continues to work as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Parikh is consistently recognized for her work on artificial intelligence at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning by outlets like Forbes and Vogue. She has also received numerous awards including the NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and four Google Faculty Research Awards. Parikh earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

Jimeng Sun recently received tenure from the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Sun is an associate professor and focuses on machine learning and deep learning for healthcare and tensor analysis. He has published over 120 papers and holds five patents. He was recently named as one of the top 100 global leaders in artificial intelligence for health by Deep Knowledge Analytics. Sun earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007.

Rich Vuduc has been promoted to professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Vuduc is an expert in high-performance computing (HPC), also known as supercomputing. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, several best paper awards at multiple ACM and IEEE conferences, and a DARPA Computer Science Study Group grant. Vuduc earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Taesoo Kim has received tenure and been promoted to associate professor. Housed in the School of Computer Science, Kim researches programming languages, systems security, distributed systems, and operating systems. Kim holds a masters and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has earned numerous awards including a 2019 Google Research Award, 2017 Mozilla Research Award, and 2018 NSF CAREER Award.

Yao Xie has been promoted to Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). Xie has been with Georgia Tech since 2013 and focuses on signal processing, statistics, optimization, and machine learning. She is particularly interested in sequential analysis and change-point detection and their broad applications in sensor networks, social networks, imaging and communications.

Her work on redistricting design was recently implemented by the Atlanta Police Department. Xie received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2011.

Santanu Dey has been promoted to professor in H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). Dey served as a Diversity and Inclusion Fellow at Georgia Tech in 2017 and he currently serves on the editorial board of Computational Optimization and Applications, MOS-SIAM book series on optimization. His research interests include non-convex optimization, in particular with mixed integer linear and nonlinear programming. He received the NSF Career Award in 2012. Dey holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Purdue University.