Five MIT professors and two additional alumni were recently named to the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.schmidtsciences.org/schmidt-sciences-to-award-12-million-to-advance-research-on-beneficial-ai/”>2024 cohort of AI2050 fellows. The honor is announced annually by Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt's philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation.
Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed at helping solve difficult problems in ai. Within their research, each fellow will confront the central motivating question of AI2050: “It is 2050. ai has proven to be enormously beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we took advantage of to ensure this result?
This year's MIT-affiliated AI2050 fellows include:
David AuthorDaniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, and co-director of MIT's Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and the National Bureau of Economic Research's Labor Studies Program, has been named AI2050 2024 Senior Fellow. His scholarship explores the impacts of technological change and labor market globalization on job polarization, skills demand, income levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. Autor's AI2050 project will leverage real-time data on ai adoption to shed light on how new tools interact with human capabilities to shape employment and income. The work will provide an accessible framework for entrepreneurs, technologists and policymakers seeking to understand, in a tangible way, how ai can complement human experience. The author has received numerous awards and honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and the 25th Heinz Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work. “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and income prospects for American workers.” In 2023, Autor was one of two researchers from all scientific fields selected as a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist.
Sara Beeryassistant professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and principal investigator in the Computer Science and artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been named an early career fellow. Beery's work focuses on developing computer vision methods that enable environmental and biodiversity monitoring at a global scale across data modalities and addressing real-world challenges, including strong spatiotemporal correlations, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories. and long-tailed distributions. It collaborates with non-governmental organizations and government agencies to implement its methods around the world and works to increase the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through capacity development and interdisciplinary education. Beery earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from Seattle University and a doctorate in computer science and mathematical sciences from Caltech, where she was honored with the Amori Prize for her outstanding dissertation.
Gabriele Farinaassistant professor at EECS and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), has been named an early-career fellow. Farina's work lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer science, operations research, and economics. Specifically, it focuses on learning and optimization methods for sequential decision making and convex-concave saddle point problems, with applications to finding equilibrium in games. Farina also studies computational game theory and recently co-authored a Science study about combining linguistic models with strategic reasoning. He received the NeurIPS Best Paper Award and was a facebook Fellow in Economics and Computer Science. His thesis was recognized with the 2023 ACM SIGecom Doctoral Thesis Award and one of two Honorable Mentions of the 2023 ACM Thesis Award, among others.
Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD '17, associate professor at EECS and the Institute of Medical Engineering and Sciences, 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 appointed member at the beginning of his career. Ghassemi's research at Healthy ML Group creates a rigorous quantitative framework in which to design, develop and deploy ML models in a robust and fair way, focusing on healthcare environments. Her contributions range from building socially conscious models to enhancing robust learning methods in subgroups and shifts to identifying important ideas in model implementation scenarios that have implications for policy, health practice, and equity. Among other awards, Ghassemi has been named one of the MIT technology Review's 35 innovators under 35; and has been awarded the 2018 Seth J. Teller Prize, the 2023 MIT Open Data Prize, 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 appeared in the popular press as Forbes, Fortune, MIT Newsand The Huffington Post.
Yoon Kimassistant professor at EECS and principal investigator at CSAIL, has been named an early-career fellow. Kim's work spans the intersection between natural language processing and machine learning, addressing efficient training and deployment of large-scale models, learning from small data, neurosymbolic approaches, grounded language learning, and connections between computational and human language processing. Affiliated with CSAIL, Kim earned his PhD in computer science from Harvard University; his master's degree in data science from New York University; his master's degree in statistics from Columbia University; and his bachelor's degree in mathematics and economics from Cornell University.
Additional alumni Roger Grosse PhD '14, associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, and David Rolnick '12, PhD '18, assistant professor at the Mila-Quebec ai Institute, were also named senior fellows and start of career, respectively.
