CDS Students Sanae Lotfi and Lucius Bynum Receive the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship
Congratulations to CDS PhD students Sanae Lotfi and Lucius Bynum for recently receiving the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship! The fellowship is a global program that acknowledges outstanding students in computing research. Fellowships are offered across the globe in APAC (Asia-Pacific), Canada and the United States, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. Over the past two decades, the program has supported over 700 fellows, who subsequently have spearheaded research in technology or accepted faculty positions at prestigious universities.
About the Fellows
Sanae is currently interested in designing robust models that can generalize well in-distribution and out-of-distribution, alongside the closely related question of understanding and quantifying the generalization properties of deep neural networks. More broadly, her research interests include the mathematics of deep learning, probabilistic modeling, Bayesian learning, large-scale optimization, and time series modeling. Before joining CDS, Sanae obtained a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Polytechnique Montreal and a general engineering degree from Ecole Centrale Paris. “I’m very honored and privileged to be awarded the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship,” says Sanae. “Receiving this fellowship means to me that my research is recognized as meaningful and impactful not only for the machine learning community in academia but also for industry. This incredible recognition gives me additional motivation to pursue the research directions that I am most excited about!”
Lucius’ current research focuses on the intersection between responsible data science, causal inference, and inequality — looking at statistical aspects of inequality problems, the modeling of social categories like race and gender, and techniques that can aid in the responsible and transparent use and analysis of data. Prior to joining CDS, he worked as a researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in their Applied Statistics and Computational Modeling group.
For more information about the fellowship, please visit the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship webpage.
By Ashley C. McDonald
