Recently, the Sloan Research Award, known as the "Wind vane of the Nobel Prize", announced the 2022 winners list. Established in 1955, the Sloan Research Prize is awarded annually to support and reward outstanding scientists and scholars early in their careers. A total of 118 scientific researchers have won this honor, including 27 Chinese scholars. They will receive a $75,000 award that can be spent on any expenses to support their research over two years.
The subject areas of this year's inductees include chemistry, computer science, earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics, and the inductees are from 51 universities in the United States and Canada. Among the 20 candidates in the field of computer science, 5 are Chinese scholars, and 3 of them are Tsinghua alumni, namely Chen Danqi, Fang Fei and Gu Quanquan. In the list of 20 scholars who have won awards in the field of mathematics, there are 7 Chinese winners, of which Peking University holds two seats, namely Liu Yuchen and Zhang Ruixiang from the School of Mathematical Sciences of Peking University. The other five Chinese are Yuxin Chen of the University of Pennsylvania, Lei Chen of the University of Maryland, College Park, Chao Gao of the University of Chicago, Jingyin Huang of Ohio State University, and Li-Cheng Tsai of Rutgers University, New Jersey.
The following is a detailed introduction of the five award-winning Chinese scholars in the field of computer science:
Chen Danqi
Personal homepage: Danqi Chen's Homepage
Before winning the Sloan Prize, Chen Danqi, who was born in Yaoban of Tsinghua University, has received much attention in the computer field. The CDQ divide and conquer algorithm is named after her.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, focusing on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and deep learning in the field of artificial intelligence. According to the personal homepage of the school's official website, she is an alumnus of Tsinghua Yao Class in 2008. She received a doctorate degree from Stanford University's Department of Computer Science in 2018, and her graduation thesis also won the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award. Chen Danqi also worked as a research intern at Microsoft Research and Facebook AI Research Department, and later became a visiting scientist at Facebook AI Research Department in Seattle and a visiting researcher at the University of Washington in 2019.
Fang Fei
Personal homepage: Fei Fang
Fang Fei is a 2007 undergraduate from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University. In 2016, he received a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Southern California (USC), and also won the best graduation thesis award. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Software Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His main research area is artificial intelligence, with a focus on the integration of computational game theory and learning.
She has won numerous awards for her research, including runner-up for best paper at the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021 IJCAI Prize for Computers and Ideas, runner-up for the IFAAMAS-16 Victor Lesser Distinguished Paper Award, William F. Ballhaus, Jr. Outstanding Graduate Engineering Research Award, etc. Her research has also been successfully applied to detect illegal mining sites and poachers, patrolling to protect ferries and woodlands, and to protect fishery resources, contributing to a more harmonious social environment.
Gu Quanquan
Personal homepage: Quanquan Gu
Gu Quanquan is a 2003 Tsinghua undergraduate majoring in automation, a master's degree in control science and engineering, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2014. Currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), his research is in statistical machine learning, with a focus on developing and analyzing non-convex optimization algorithms for machine learning to understand large-scale, dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous data, And lay a theoretical foundation for deep learning.
Song Shuran
Personal homepage: Shuran Song
Song Shuran, an alumnus of HKUST, is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, focusing on computer vision and robotics. He has won awards such as Amazon Research Award, TRI Young Teacher Award and IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper.
Li Bo
Personal homepage: Bo Li | Computer Science | UIUC
Li Bo is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her research areas are artificial intelligence and security and privacy. Her research interests are information theory, game theory, and adversarial machine learning. Received honors such as the 2019 Q4 AWS Machine Learning Research Award, the 2020 MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, and the Intel 2020 Rising Star Teacher Award.
The full list of the 20 winners in Computer Science is as follows:
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Mark Bun, Boston University
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Danqi, Princeton University
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David K. Duvenaud, University of Toronto
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Fei Fang, Carnegie Mellon University
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Manya Ghobadi, MIT
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Quanquan Gu, UCLA
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Josiah Hester, Northwestern University
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Phillip Isola, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Alec Jacobson, University of Toronto
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Pravesh K. Kothari, Carnegie Mellon University
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Bo Li, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Pedro Lopes, University of Chicago
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Nicolas Papernot, University of Toronto
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Dorsa Sadigh, Stanford University
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Shuran Song, Columbia University
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Deian Stefan, UC San Diego
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Avishay Tal, UC Berkeley
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Yulia Tsvetkov, University of Washington
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Henry Yuen, Columbia University
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Matei Zaharia, Stanford University
The Sloan Fellowship has long been one of the most coveted awards for young researchers, as past inductees have become the most influential scientists in their fields. According to statistics, among the previous winners of the Sloan Scholarship, 53 candidates have won the Nobel Prize in their respective fields, 17 won the "Nobel Prize" Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 won the National Medal of Science, and 22 won the "Nobel Prize" Fields Medal in mathematics. John Bates Clark Prize in Economics.
To be eligible for the Sloan Scholarship, candidates must meet the following eligibility requirements:
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Candidates must have a PhD or equivalent in chemistry, computer science, earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, or a related field.
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Candidates must be faculty members of a college, university, or other degree-granting institution in the United States or Canada.
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Candidates must be tenured, albeit indefinite, beginning September 15 of the year of nomination.
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Candidates for teaching positions must have regular teaching obligations.
For the full list of 2022 Sloan Research Award recipients, see: 2022 Fellows
Reference link:
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https://sloan.org/fellowships/2022-Fellows