Salman Avestimehr

Dean's Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science

Education

2008, Doctoral Degree, University of California - Berkeley
2005, Master's Degree, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California - Berkeley
2003, Bachelor's Degree, Electrical Engineering, Sharif University Of Technology

Biography

Salman Avestimehr is a Dean's Professor, the inaugural director of the USC-Amazon Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning (Trusted AI), and director of the Information Theory and Machine Learning (vITAL) research lab. He is also the CEO and co-founder of FedML. He was also an Amazon Scholar in 2021. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2003. He was an Assistant Professor at the ECE school of Cornell University from 2009 to 2013. He was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Mathematics of Information (CMI) at Caltech in 2008. His research interests are in the areas of information theory, machine learning, distributed computing, secure and private learning/computing, and federated learning.

Dr. Avestimehr has received various awards for his research and teaching, including The 2019 IEEE Information Theory Society James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award, an Information Theory Society and Communication Society Joint Paper Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, a Young Investigator Program (YIP) award from the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize, and several Best Paper Awards at Conferences. He has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He was a general Co-Chair of the 2020 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). He is also a Fellow of IEEE.

Research Summary

Current research areas of Prof. Avestimehr include information theory, machine learning, distributed computing, secure and private learning/computing, and federated learning. Prof. Avestimehr is the inaugural director of the USC-Amazon Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning (Trusted AI), and director of the Information Theory and Machine Learning (vITAL) research lab. He is also the CEO and co-founder of FedML

Awards

2022 Best Paper Award at FL-AAAI 2022
2022 Best Paper Award at ACL-FL4NLP
2022 The IEEE Information Theory Society Thomas M. Cover Dissertation Award (as advisor)
2021 Invited Speaker at National Academy of Engineering (NAE) EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
2021 USC Mentoring Award
2021 Qualcomm Innovation Award (as advisor)
2020 IEEE Fellow
2020 Baidu Best Paper Award at NeurIPS Spicy-FL Workshop
2019 IEEE Information Theory Society James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award
2019 ACM/IEEE High Performance Computing Conference (SC) Best Paper and Best Student Paper Award Finalists
2019 ACM Mobihoc Best Paper Award Finalist (top 7 papers)
2019 CAMS Prizes for Excellence in Research with a Substantial Mathematical Component (as advisor)
2017 Jack K. Wolf Best Paper Award, 2017 IEEE Int. Symp. Inf. Theory (ISIT)
2017 Best Paper Award, 2017 IEEE GLOBECOM Conference
2015 Okawa Foundation Research Award
2013 Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award
2013 Qualcomm Innovation Award
2012 Michael Tien Excellebte in Teaching Award
2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from White House (President Obama)
2011 US Air Force Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award
2010 National Science Foundation CAREER award
2009 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize (Best PhD Dissertation) from UC Berkeley
2005 Vodafone-U.S. Foundation Fellows Initiative Research Merit Award
1999 Presidential Award for Ranking 2nd in Iranian National Qualifying Exam from President Khatami
1998 Silver Medal Recipient in National Mathematical Olympiad

Appointments

Dir-Center, Amazon Center
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

Office

EEB 504B
Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center
3740 McClintock Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90089
USC Mail Code: 2562

Contact Information

(213) 740-7326
avestime@usc.edu

Links

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