Honglak Lee selected for Sloan Research Fellowship

Assistant Professor Honglak Lee has been selected for a 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for his work in deep learning and representation learning.

Prof. Lee’s research interests lie in machine learning and its applications to artificial intelligence. In particular, he focuses on deep learning and representation learning, which aims to learn an abstract representation of the data by a hierarchical and compositional structure. Specific application areas include computer vision, audio recognition, robotics, text modeling, and healthcare.

Prof. Lee is currently developing deep learning algorithms aimed at disentangling variations from complex data, and the development of a graphical model with deep representations that can model complex dependencies between output variables.

“Getting early-career support can be a make-or-break moment for a young scholar,” said Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “In an increasingly competitive academic environment, it can be difficult to stand out, even when your work is first rate. The Sloan Research Fellowships have become an unmistakable marker of quality among researchers. Fellows represent the best-of-the-best among young scientists.”

Prof. Lee received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2010 and joined the faculty at Michigan that year. He has served as a guest editor of IEEE TPAMI Special Issue on Learning Deep Architectures, as well as area chairs of ICML, NIPS, ICCV, AAAI, IJCAI, and ICLR. He was named one of AI’s 10 to Watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013 and received an NSF CAREER award in 2015. He is a recent recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award and was named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor in 2016. He is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS).

About the 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.