News

This year, five WNCG alumni and postdoctoral fellows accepted faculty positions throughout the country. Their acceptance continues the recent wave over the last few years of WNCG students and postdoctoral fellows finding permanent homes at some of the world’s leading institutions. Here’s a quick look at where a few of these alumni are headed, what they look forward to most about being a faculty member and how WNCG helped prepare them for their new ventures. Joe Neeman WNCG Advisor: Sujay Sanghavi

WNCG Alumnus Sanmi Koyejo recently accepted a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He will join UIUC as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science where his research will focus on Machine Learning. “I look forward to the opportunity to mentor students and pioneer impactful interdisciplinary research,” Prof. Koyejo states. According to Prof. Koyejo, his time at WNCG was invaluable for securing a faculty position at a prestigious university like UIUC.

Prof. Joydeep Ghosh of UT ECE was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Workshop on Divergences and Divergence Learning (WDDl), held in Atlanta, June 2013. In his talk, entitled "Learning Bregman Divergences for Prediction with Generalized Linear Models," which reflects joint work with ECE and WNCG student Sreangsu Acharrya,  an efficient approach to learning a broad class of predictive models was introduced. What is most remarkable about this approach is that model parameters can be estimated even when the loss function is unknown.