Ethiopian computer scientist, Rediet Abebe, who is also an assistant Computer Science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wins the Doctoral Dissertation Award from ACM SIGKDD, world’s largest computing organization.
Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), on its twitter page, announced that Rediet has won the prestigious thesis award for her work titled “Designing Algorithms for Social Good.”
SIGKDD is an interest group under the Association Of Computing Machinery (ACM), the US-based largest computer science community in the world.
It holds an annual venue on the field of computing, which includes the dissertation award recognizing outstanding work done by graduate students in the areas of data science, machine learning, and data mining.
Rediet, went to the US and earned a Bachelor’s Degree From Harvard University, in Mathematics and later MSC in Applied Mathematics, after completing primary and secondary education in Addis Ababa.
After college, Rediet completed her doctoral degree in computer science at Cornell University, becoming the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer science at the university.
In addition, Rediet became the first female computer scientist to be selected as a junior fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows, a group of high achieving Harvard University scholars in 2019.
She has made research on Artificial Intelligence and algorithms that have focused on addressing communities struggling with economic burdens and inequality.
She co-founded the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) initiative, a multi-disciplinary research collective that uses algorithms and mechanism design to tackle inequality by connecting the community of researchers that are committed to using algorithms to improve social service.
In 2019, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) honored Rediate as the World’s Top 35 Innovators Under the age of 35, for her work in co-founding MD4SG.
As the winner of the SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award, Rediet will be recognized at the KDD conference, receive a plaque, a check for $2,500, and free registration to attend the SIGKDD conference.
The winner and runners-up will also be invited to present their work in a special session at the KDD conference.
