Maria-Florina Balcan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nina Balcan
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|---|---|
| Born |
Maria-Florina Balcan
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| Alma mater | University of Bucharest Carnegie Mellon University (PhD) |
| Awards | Sloan Research Fellowship (2014) Grace Murray Hopper Award (2019) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Machine learning Algorithmic game theory Theoretical computer science |
| Institutions | Carnegie Mellon University Microsoft Research Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | New Theoretical Frameworks for Machine Learning (2008) |
| Doctoral advisor | Avrim Blum |
Maria-Florina (Nina) Balcan is a computer scientist from Romania and America. She studies how computers can learn and make smart decisions. Her work includes machine learning, which is about teaching computers to learn from data. She also studies algorithmic game theory, which looks at how people or computers make choices when they interact. Nina Balcan is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Education and Early Life
Nina Balcan grew up in Romania. She went to the University of Bucharest and earned two degrees in 2000. She studied both mathematics and computer science. She finished with very high honors, called summa cum laude.
She continued her studies at the University of Bucharest. In 2002, she earned a master's degree in computer science. Later, she moved to the United States. She earned her PhD in computer science in 2008. This degree was from Carnegie Mellon University, where Avrim Blum was her research supervisor.
Career and Research Focus
After finishing her PhD, Nina Balcan worked as a researcher. She was at Microsoft Research New England for a while. In 2009, she became a professor. She taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing.
In 2014, she returned to Carnegie Mellon University. There, she became a tenured faculty member. This means she has a permanent teaching position.
Nina Balcan is very involved in the world of computer science. She has helped lead important conferences. These include the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). These events bring together experts to share new ideas in machine learning.
Awards and Achievements
Nina Balcan has received many awards for her work. She was named a Microsoft Faculty Fellow in 2011. In 2014, she became a Sloan Research Fellow. She was also a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2015.
In 2019, she won the Grace Murray Hopper Award. This is a big honor from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She received it for her important work in "minimally-supervised learning." This means teaching computers to learn with very little help from humans.
She was also named a Simons Investigator in 2021. In 2023, she became an ACM Fellow. This award recognized her important contributions to machine learning. It also honored her work in how machine learning can be used in economics and designing algorithms.
