Six Members of GT Computing Awarded Prestigious Fellowships

Each year, Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is home to a number of students and faculty who are recognized by the computing community with fellowships from industry across the field.

This year is no different as six GT Computing individuals have been awarded fellowships with four different companies, including J.P. Morgan, IBM, Snap, and Facebook. Only those who accepted their awards are listed below.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. awarded Charles David Byrd (Research Scientist and Ph.D. student advised by Professor Tucker Balch) and Assistant Professor Xu Chu for efforts in artificial intelligence research. It is the company’s first AI Research Awards, which are aimed at studying the use of AI and machine learning in areas including investment advice, risk management, digital assistants, and trading behavior. Only 47 fellowships were awarded by the company.

Byrd’s work, along with Balch, is focused on machine learning for financial applications, investigating mutual fund portfolio inference, intraday equity market forecasting, stock market simulation, and machine learning approaches to the evaluation of market efficiency. Byrd has been recognized in the past as the 2018 Graduate Student Instructor of the Year Award in the School of Interactive Computing.

Chu’s research interests revolve around two themes: using data management technologies to make machine learning more usable and using machine learning to tackle hard data management problems like data integration. Chu also earned the Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship in 2015.

IBM

Ph.D. student Stacey Truex of the School of Computer Science was named a 2019 IBM Ph.D. Fellow. The Fellowship, which has been around since the 1950s, recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are focused on solving problems that are fundamental to innovation. This includes pioneering work in areas like cognitive computing and augmented intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain, data-centric systems, advanced analytics, security, radical cloud innovation, and more. This highly-competitive award was given to only 16 Ph.D. students worldwide.

Truex (advised by Professor Ling Liu) focuses on research from two complementary perspectives: 1) privacy, security, and trust in machine learning models and algorithmic decision making, and 2) secure, privacy-preserving artificial intelligence systems, services, and applications.

Snap, Inc.

Snap, Inc., recognized Ph.D. student Harsh Agrawal of the School of Interactive Computing with the 2019 Snap Research Fellowship and Scholarship. This fellowship recognizes students carrying out research in areas of computer science relevant to the company, including computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, computational imaging, human-computer interaction, and other related fields. Each awardee will receive a $10,000 award and an offer for a full-time paid internship with the company.

Agrawal (advised by Assistant Professor Dhruv Batra) does research at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he spent time as a research engineer at Snap Research, where he was responsible for building large-scale infrastructure for visual recognition, search and developed algorithms for low-shot instance detection.

Facebook

Facebook Research announced the selection of 21 Fellows and seven Emerging Scholars this year out of more than 900 submitted applications from Ph.D. students all over the world. Among the awardees were Abhishek Das with the Facebook Fellowship and Vanessa Oguamanam with the Emerging Scholar Award. The Facebook Fellowship program, now in its eighth year, is designed to encourage and support doctoral students engaged in innovative research in computer science and engineering.

Das (advised by Dhruv Batra) does research in deep learning and its applications in building agents that can see, think, talk, and act. His research has been supported by fellowships from Facebook, Adobe, and Snap, Inc., over the years. Oguamanam, who is in the School of Interactive Computing, pursues research in educational technology, human-computer interaction for development, diversity in STEM, and entrepreneurship. She is co-advised by Associate Professor Betsy DiSalvo and Assistant Professor Neha Kumar.