Computer Science Assistant Professor Karthik Sridharan has been named a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship. These awards support early-career faculty members' original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance. "The Sloan research fellows represent the very best science has to offer," said Adam Falk, Sloan Foundation president. "The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems and succeeding brilliantly -- Sloan fellows are quite literally the future of 21st-century science."
Sridharan's research has focused on machine learning (ML) and developing a unifying theory and algorithm design principles for online learning. Since 2010, his group has produced more than a half-dozen papers addressing the challenges of developing algorithms for online learning. Future work, according to Sridharan, will employ his unifying approach to "transform theoretically well-founded ML into an easily usable technology." Focuses included automation of ML into "plug-and-play" technology and the creation of socially responsible ML to build nonpolarizing recommender systems.