Honors and Awards – NYU Center for Data Science

Faculty Honors

The below list recognizes faculty working at CDS who have earned awards since our center’s founding in 2013:

ACADEMIA EUROPAEA MEMBERSHIP, Julia Kempe (2018)
ACADEMY OF TELEVISION ARTS & SCIENCES, EMMY AWARD, Claudio Silva (2018), Eero Simoncelli (2015)
ACM FELLOW, Juliana Freire (2014)
ALFRED P. SLOAN RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP, Jonathan Niles-Weed (2022), Afonso Bandeira, Joan Bruna Estrach (2018)
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ELECTED MEMBER, Eero Simoncelli (2019)
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS) FELLOWSHIP, Juliana Freire, Yann LeCun (2022)
AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION EMERGING SCHOLAR AWARD, Arthur Spirling (2018)
CHAIRE GEORGES LEMAîTRE, UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, BELGIUM, 2017, Kyle S. Cranmer (2017)
CHEVALIER IN THE FRENCH LEGION OF HONOR, Yann LeCun (2020)
CIFAR AZRIELI GLOBAL SCHOLAR, Kyunghyun Cho (2017)
GOOGLE FACULTY RESEARCH AWARD, Kyunghyun Cho and Cristina Savin (2020)
GOOGLE RESEARCH COLLABS, Sam Bowman, Juliana Freire, He He, Jonathan Niles-Weed (2021)
HAROLD PENDER AWARD, Yann LeCun (2018)
INNOVATIVE RESEARCH INTERCHANGE MEDAL, Yann LeCun (2018)
INSTITUTE ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF TANDON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING, Julia Stoyanovich (September 2021 – August 2024)
INSTITUTE PROFESSOR OF TANDON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING, Claudio Silva (2021)
JAMES H. WILKINSON PRIZE, Stefan Karpinksi (2018)
MINERVA FOUNDATION GOLDEN BRAIN AWARD FOR FUNDAMENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO VISUAL NEUROSCIENCE, Eero Simoncelli (2017)
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW 35 UNDER 35, Brenden Lake (2019)
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING OF KOREA, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, Kyunghyun Cho (2023)
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION CAREER AWARD, Andrew Gordon Wilson (2022), Samuel Bowman (2021), Joan Bruna Estrach (2019), and Julia Stoyanovich (2018)
NYU GOLDEN DOZEN, Arthur Spirling (2019)
SAMSUNG-HO-AM PRIZE, Kyunghyun Cho (2021)
SAVAGE AWARD, Rajesh Ranganath (2018)
SILVER PROFESSORSHIP, Eero Simoncelli (2015 – present), Yann LeCun (2008 – present)
TURING AWARD, Yann LeCun (2018)

BEST PAPERS

ACM SIGMOD CONTRIBUTIONS AWARD, Juliana Freire (2020)
ACM SIGSOFT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MINING SOFTWARE REPOSITORIES (MSR) DISTINGUISHED PAPER AWARD, Juliana Freire (2019)
ACM SIGMOD MOST REPRODUCIBLE PAPER AWARD, Juliana Freire, Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships Between Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets, (2018)
EUROPEAN RESEARCH PAPER OF THE YEAR, Foster Provost awarded by AIS & CIONET for a paper in MISQ, (2017)
EUROVIS, Claudio Silva, Baseball Timeline: Summarizing Baseball Plays Into a Static Visualization, (2018)
IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON IMAGE PROCESSING TOP 10% PAPER AWARD, Eero Simoncelli (2014)
IEEE SIGNALING PROCESSING SOCIETY SUSTAINED IMPACT PAPER AWARD, Eero Simoncelli, Perceptual image quality assessment: From error visibility to structural similarity (2016)
IEEE VAST, Claudio Silva, Bowen Yu, FlowSense: A Natural Language Interface for Visual Data Exploration with a Dataflow System, (2019)
INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH, Foster Provost (2018)
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING, Nan Wu, Jason Phang, Jungkyu Park, Yiqiu Shen, Zhe Huang, Thibault Févry, Kyunghyun Cho, Krzysztof Geras, and collaborators, Deep Neural Networks Improve Radiologists’ Performance in Breast Cancer Screening, (2019)
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MINING SOFTWARE REPOSITORIES (MSR) FOSS IMPACT PAPER AWARD, Juliana Freire (2019)
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE, Kyunghyun Cho, Transfer Learning for Music Classification and Regression Tasks, (2018)
INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON TRAFFIC MEASUREMENTS FOR CYBERSECURITY (WTMC), IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY, Juliana Freire, Discovering and Measuring Malicious URL Redirection Campaigns from Fake News Domains (2021)
NEURIPS 2021 OPTIMAL TRANSPORT AND MACHINE LEARNING WORKSHOP BEST PAPER AWARD, Jonathan Niles-Weed (with CDS PhD student Aram-Alexandre Pooladian), Entropic estimation of optimal transport maps (2021)
NVIDIA PIONEER, Kyunghyun Cho, Loss Functions for Multiset Prediction, (2018)
SOCIETY OF MATHEMATICAL PSYCHOLOGY OUTSTANDING PAPER AWARD, Todd Gureckis and Brenden Lake, “Do People Ask Good Questions?” Computational Brain & Behavior, 1, 69–89 (2018)
WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN ONLINE MISBEHAVIOR (CYBERSAFETY), Juliana Freire for A proactive fake news domain discovery system using real-time social media feeds (2020)

THE TURING AWARD

“In the 1980s, LeCun developed convolutional neural networks, a foundational principle in the field, which, among other advantages, have been essential in making deep learning more efficient. In the late 1980s, while working at the University of Toronto and Bell Labs, LeCun was the first to train a convolutional neural network system on images of handwritten digits. Today, convolutional neural networks are an industry standard in computer vision, as well as in speech recognition, speech synthesis, image synthesis, and natural language processing. They are used in a wide variety of applications, including autonomous driving, medical image analysis, voice-activated assistants, and information filtering.”

WINNER: YANN LECUN (2018)

Additional References: Yecun’s Turing Profile | The Verge Article | Facebook Research Article

ACADEMIA EUROPAEA MEMBERSHIP

“The object of Academia Europaea is the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in the aforesaid subjects in Europe.

WINNER: JULIA KEMPE (2018)

ALFRED P. SLOAN RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

“The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. The 2020 Sloan Research Fellows will receive fellowships in the amount of $75,000.”

WINNERS: AFONSO BANDEIRA & JOAN BRUNA ESTRACH (2018)

Additional References: Princeton University Article | NYU Article

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION CAREER AWARD

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. NSF encourages submission of CAREER proposals from early-career faculty at all CAREER-eligible organizations and especially encourages women, members of underrepresented minority groups, and persons with disabilities to apply.

WINNERS: JULIA STOYANOVICH (2018) JOAN BRUNA ESTRACH (2018)

Julia Stoyanovich and Joan Bruna Estrach

CIFAR AZRIELI GLOBAL SCHOLAR

“CIFAR invites exceptional early career researchers to participate in CIFAR’s network of more than 400 researchers from over 22 countries, who together are pursuing answers to some of the most complex challenges facing the world today. The CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program provides funding, skills training, mentorship, and opportunities to collaborate with outstanding colleagues from diverse disciplines, positioning scholars as research leaders and agents of change.”

WINNER: KYUNGHYUN CHO (2017-2019)

Additional Reference: Medium Article

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW 35 UNDER 35

“Brenden Lake created an AI program that can learn novel handwritten characters as well as a human can after seeing just a single example. That might seem mundane in a world where AI controls self-driving cars and beats the world’s best Go players. But today’s state-of-the-art deep-learning approaches train on thousands of examples and aren’t great at transferring their learning to new problems. A human who’s shown an unfamiliar object once, on the other hand, will be able to recognize a new example, draw it, and understand its various parts.”

WINNER: BRENDEN LAKE (2019)

NYU GOLDEN DOZEN AWARDS

“Each year, the College of Arts and Science recognizes faculty for their outstanding contribution to learning in the classroom. Twelve regular full-time faculty members are chosen to receive Golden Dozen Teaching Awards from nominations submitted by CAS students and faculty. A similar number of adjunct faculty members receive the College’s Outstanding Teaching Award. The College will also recognize a faculty member who has developed innovative technological solutions to enhance student learning through the Teach/Tech Award. It is our hope that this award will inspire faculty with and without experience in this area to think creatively about the possibilities of teaching with technology.”

WINNER: ARTHUR SPIRLING (2019)

SILVER PROFESSORSHIP

WINNER: YANN LECUN (2008 – Present)

THE HAROLD PENDER AWARD

“The Harold Pender Award, initiated in 1972 and named after founding Dean Harold Pender, is given by the Faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science of the University of Pennsylvania to an outstanding member of the engineering profession who has achieved distinction by significant contributions to society.^[1] The Pender Award is the School of Engineering’s highest honor.”

WINNER: YANN LECUN (2018)

Additional Reference: The Harold Pender Award Lecture

INNOVATIVE RESEARCH INTERCHANGE MEDAL

“The IRI Medal, established in 1946, recognizes and honors leaders of technology for their outstanding accomplishments in technological innovation which contribute broadly to the development of industry and to the benefit of society. This award is traditionally presented at the IRI Annual Conference held each spring. One side of the medal depicts the scientist in a never-ending quest for knowledge. Imagination and mental activity are symbolized by Pegasus. The practical results of harnessing national forces to meet the needs of mankind are represented in the clouds issuing from the retort. The reverse side of the medal is an adaptation of the official seal of the Industrial Research Institute.”

WINNER: YANN LECUN (2018)

Additional Reference: NYU Scholars Article | The Power and Limits of Deep Learning

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE

“The International Society of Music Information Retrieval is a non-profit organization seeking to advance the access, organization, and understanding of music information. As a field, music information retrieval focuses on the research and development of computational systems to help humans better make sense of this data, drawing from a diverse set of disciplines, including, but by no means limited to, music theory, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, library science, electrical engineering, and machine learning.”

BEST PAPER PRIZE WINNER: KYUNGHYUN CHO for “Transfer Learning for Music Classification and Regression Tasks.” (2017)

NYC AUTOMATED DECISION SYSTEMS TASK FORCE

In May of 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the creation of the Automated Decision Systems Task Force which explores how New York City uses algorithms. The task force, the first of its kind in the U.S., works to develop a process for reviewing “automated decision systems,” commonly known as algorithms, through the lens of equity, fairness and accountability.

WINNER: JULIA STOYANOVICH (2018)

SIGMOD BEST DEMONSTRATION

“The ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data is concerned with the principles, techniques and applications of database management systems and data management technology. Our members include software developers, academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, users, and students. SIGMOD sponsors the annual SIGMOD/PODS conference, one of the most important and selective in the field. SIGMOD recognizes the best demonstration at the annual conference.”

WINNERS: CLAUDIO SILVA, JULIANA FREIRE (2018)

CHAIRE GEORGES LEMAîTRE, UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, BELGIUM

Since its creation in 2016, the Georges Lemaître Chair has been awarded every year to a world-leading personality in physics in the fields of fundamental interactions and cosmology. The Georges Lemaître Chair is named after Georges Lemaître, one of all times Belgium’s leading physicists and recognized father of the Big Bang theory. He was a professor at UCLouvain from 1925 to 1964.

WINNER: KYLE S. CRANMER (2017)