Virginia Smith, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department, has received a 2022 Intel Rising Star Faculty Award for her work in federated learning.

Presented annually, the $50,000 award recognizes early career faculty members who show great promise as future academic leaders in disruptive computing technologies and facilitates long-term collaboration between academia and senior technical leaders at Intel. Award recipients also stand out among their peers for their innovative teaching methods and efforts to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science and engineering. 

Smith, who also holds a courtesy appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty in 2018 after earning her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research aims to make federated learning — a technique that considers performing machine learning across private data silos — as seamless and secure as learning over centralized data. Earlier this year, she received an NSF CAREER Award to support her work in this area, and MIT Technology Review included her in its 2021 list of 35 Innovators Under 35.

For more about the award and the other 2022 recipients, visit the Intel Research website.