Professor Guy Van den Broeck, along with three other UCLA faculty members, is among the 126 researchers from more than 60 research institutions in the United States and Canada named as 2020 Sloan Research Fellows.
Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early career researchers, often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks. Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 165 faculty from UCLA have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the two-year, $75,000 grants recognize outstanding scientists and scholars early in their careers. Recipients can use the grants as they wish to further their research.
Van den Broeck is an assistant professor of computer science in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, whose research interests include machine learning, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and applications of probabilistic reasoning and learning. His current research focus includes unifying two distinct branches of AI — data-centric machine learning and symbolic reasoning, the latter being a more established area that relies on logic. He directs the UCLA Statistical and Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI) laboratory. Among his awards are a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the IJCAI 2019 Computers and Thought Award. His courses include fundamentals of artificial intelligence.
Sloan Research Fellowships are available to scholars in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists, and winning fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars in their field on the basis of the nominee’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in the field.