Aaditya Ramdas, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department and the Department of Statistics & Data Science in Dietrich College, has received a $60,000 award from Google's Research Scholar Program to study structured uncertainty quantification.

Before researchers make real-world decisions based on machine learning predictions, they first need a sense of how sure the algorithm is about its predictions, but the complex nature of algorithms gives researchers little understanding of what goes on inside them once they input data. This funding will help Ramdas and his team develop new methods for measuring the prediction uncertainty for these algorithms without making distributional assumptions about the data.

Ramdas earned his Ph.D. in statistics and machine learning from CMU in 2015, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to CMU as a faculty member in 2018. His research interests center around practical theory — designing creative algorithms to solve real-world problems.

Google's Research Scholar Program supports early career professors pursuing research in fields relevant to Google, particularly those that explore technology's implications for and impacts on individuals and society. Awardees must have received their Ph.D. within the last seven years to be eligible. A full list of 2022 award recipients is available on the program's website.