Honglak Lee Receives Google Faculty Research Award

Honglak Lee, assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has been awarded a 2011 Google Faculty Research Award for his work in machine learning. The Google Faculty Research Awards program is a competitive worldwide program intended to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia. The intent of the awards program is to support academic research that is aligned with Google’s mission.

Prof. Lee’s research interests are in machine learning and its application to a range of perception problems in artificial intelligence, such as computer vision, audio recognition, robotics, and text processing. He is also interested in data mining, probabilistic graphical models, convex optimization, high-dimensional data analysis, and large-scale learning using massive datasets. His current research is centered on unsupervised feature learning and deep learning algorithms to learn useful feature representations from unlabeled and labeled data, and he has made significant contributions to this emerging field in machine learning. Related to this Google research award, his current research has direct potential impacts in real-world industrial applications, such as image search, voice search, and multimedia search; along these directions, he will be collaborating with researchers at Google.

Prof. Lee received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2010 and joined the department that year. He has received best paper awards from ICML and CEAS. His work has also appeared in the Research Highlights section of Communications of the ACM, which is devoted to the most important research results published among entire fields of computer science in recent years.

Prof. Lee has taught courses in Unsupervised Feature Learning (EECS 598), Machine Learning (EECS 545), and Discrete Mathematics (EECS 203). He is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the EECS Department.