Musco, Rahimi Selected for 2022 Google Research Scholar Awards
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Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professor Cameron Musco and Research Assistant Professor Razieh (Negin) Rahimi were selected for 2022 Google Research Scholar Awards. The program provides unrestricted gifts of up to $60,000 to support the advancement of early-career faculty research.
Musco was chosen in Google’s algorithms and optimization category in support of his work, “Random Sketching for Scalable and Data-Efficient Learning,” which attempts to introduce new techniques that allow computers to process data analysis faster. The award will support efforts to expand the breadth of problems to which linear algebraic sketching tools can be applied.
“This research can lead to significantly faster algorithms for solving a range of tasks that arise frequently in machine learning and data analysis,” says Musco. “These include finding accurate linear classifiers for large datasets, estimating treatment outcomes from randomized controlled trials, training neural networks, and beyond.”
Musco’s current research interests include algorithm design and theoretical computer science, focusing on applications in data science and machine learning. He joined the CICS faculty cohort in 2019 and earned his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rahimi, who also received $60,000, was selected to advance her work on generative rankers toward trustworthy search result diversification and was recognized in Google’s machine learning and data mining category.
“In this research, we tackle the challenge of explaining search results such that explanations are faithful to how the underlying ranker works and are also in a format that helps end-users understand the information space related to their queries,” explains Rahimi. “The goal is to develop new state-of-the-art models for information retrieval that jointly rank and explain the entire lists provided to users."
Rahimi’s research is in the field of information retrieval, text mining, and content analysis. She focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating models for a diverse range of tasks and applications related to information retrieval. Negin received her doctorate in computer science from the University of Tehran and joined the CICS faculty in 2021.