Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni were recently named to the 2024 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. The consideration is announced annually by Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that goals to speed up scientific innovation.
Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative geared toward helping to resolve hard problems in AI. Inside their research, each fellow will contend with the central motivating query of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely helpful to society. What happened? What are crucial problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to make sure this final result?”
This yr’s MIT-affiliated AI2050 Fellows include:
David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor within the MIT Department of Economics, and co-director of the MIT Shaping the Way forward for Work Initiative and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Labor Studies Program, has been named a 2024 AI2050 senior fellow. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. Autor’s AI2050 project will leverage real-time data on AI adoption to make clear how latest tools interact with human capabilities in shaping employment and earnings. The work will provide an accessible framework for entrepreneurs, technologists, and policymakers in search of to grasp, tangibly, how AI can complement human expertise. Autor has received quite a few awards and honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and the Heinz twenty fifth Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American employees.” In 2023, Autor was one in every of two researchers across all scientific fields chosen as a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist.
Sara Beery, an assistant professor within the Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been named an early profession fellow. Beery’s work focuses on constructing computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities and tackling real-world challenges, including strong spatiotemporal correlations, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She collaborates with nongovernmental organizations and government agencies to deploy her methods worldwide and works toward increasing the variety and accessibility of educational research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity-building and education. Beery earned a BS in electrical engineering and arithmetic from Seattle University and a PhD in computing and mathematical sciences from Caltech, where she was honored with the Amori Prize for her outstanding dissertation.
Gabriele Farina, an assistant professor in EECS and a principal investigator within the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), has been named an early profession fellow. Farina’s work lies on the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer science, operations research, and economics. Specifically, he focuses on learning and optimization methods for sequential decision-making and convex-concave saddle point problems, with applications to equilibrium finding in games. Farina also studies computational game theory and recently served as co-author on a Science study about combining language models with strategic reasoning. He’s a recipient of a NeurIPS Best Paper Award and was a Facebook Fellow in economics and computer science. His dissertation was recognized with the 2023 ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award and one in every of the 2 2023 ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mentions, amongst others.
Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD ’17, an associate professor in EECS and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, principal investigator at CSAIL and LIDS, and affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, has been named an early profession fellow. Ghassemi’s research within the Healthy ML Group creates a rigorous quantitative framework during which to design, develop, and place ML models in a way that is powerful and fair, specializing in health settings. Her contributions range from socially aware model construction to improving subgroup- and shift-robust learning methods to identifying essential insights in model deployment scenarios which have implications in policy, health practice, and equity. Amongst other awards, Ghassemi has been named one in every of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35; and has been awarded the 2018 Seth J. Teller Award, the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data, a 2024 NSF CAREER Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award. She founded the nonprofit Association for Health, Inference and Learning (AHLI) and her work has been featured in popular press corresponding to Forbes, Fortune, MIT News, and The Huffington Post.
Yoon Kim, an assistant professor in EECS and a principal investigator in CSAIL, has been named an early profession fellow. Kim’s work straddles the intersection between natural language processing and machine learning, and touches upon efficient training and deployment of large-scale models, learning from small data, neuro-symbolic approaches, grounded language learning, and connections between computational and human language processing. Affiliated with CSAIL, Kim earned his PhD in computer science at Harvard University; his MS in data science from Latest York University; his MA in statistics from Columbia University; and his BA in each math and economics from Cornell University.
Additional alumni Roger Grosse PhD ’14, a pc science associate professor on the University of Toronto, and David Rolnick ’12, PhD ’18, assistant professor at Mila-Quebec AI Institute, were also named senior and early profession fellows, respectively.
