Dr. Hyeji Kim has been selected to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This highly competitive award from the NSF CAREER Program supports early-career faculty who demonstrate exceptional potential as both educators and researchers, offering up to five years of funding to those who integrate innovative research with excellence in teaching in alignment with their institution’s mission.
Dr. Kim received this award based on her research project “Advancing Distributed Data Compression and Communication via Generative Models, Learning, and Information Theory.” The project aims to create smarter ways to compress and send large amounts of data—like that from smart devices or virtual reality—by using advanced computer learning techniques. The research also includes outreach efforts like classroom demos and free educational tools to help students and the public learn about the technology.
Dr. Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Fellow of the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Chair in Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2016. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2016 to 2018, after which she served as a researcher at Samsung AI Research Cambridge until 2020.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of information theory and machine learning. In applying information theory to machine learning, her current focus includes the information theoretic analysis and development of machine learning algorithms. In applying machine learning to information theory, her current focus includes the development of codes for communication and compression via machine learning. She is a recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and participant of the Rising Stars in EECS Workshop in 2015.