Thorsten Joachims, IS/CS Professor, has been named a winner of an Amazon Research Award. More than 800 applications were submitted to receive funding in the fields of computer science. Only 49 projects, including Thorsten's, were selected to be awarded with up to $80,000 per project.
"With Amazon Research Awards we want scientists to further their research in foundational areas that enable innovations for our customers and make these results available on an open source basis," said Ralf Herbrich, Director of Machine Learning at Amazon.
Joachims and his team will develop new machine learning algorithms that can learn from partial information, such as user feedback in log data. His proposal eliminates the need to randomize while collecting feedback, making the learning systems more applicable to cases like search, advertising, or recommendations that may use deterministic logging.