Maria-Florina Balcan facts for kids

Maria-Florina (Nina) Balcan is a computer scientist from Romania and America. She studies how computers can learn and make smart decisions. Her work helps us understand how to teach computers to solve problems on their own. She is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Education and Early Life

Nina Balcan grew up in Romania. She loved learning about math and computers. In 2000, she earned two bachelor's degrees from the University of Bucharest. She studied both mathematics and computer science and graduated with top honors.

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 was from Carnegie Mellon University, a famous school for computer science. Her research there was guided by Professor Avrim Blum.

Career and Research Work

After finishing her PhD, Nina Balcan worked as a researcher. She joined Microsoft Research New England for a short time. In 2009, she became a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She taught computer science there.

In 2014, she returned to Carnegie Mellon University. She became a faculty member, which means she joined the teaching staff. By 2016, she earned tenure. This means she became a permanent professor at the university.

Nina Balcan's research focuses on several exciting areas:

• Machine learning: This is about teaching computers to learn from data. It helps them make predictions or decisions without being told every single step.
• Algorithmic game theory: This field looks at how computers can make good choices. It's especially useful when different "players" (like people or other computers) are all trying to get the best outcome.
• Theoretical computer science: This is the study of the basic ideas behind computing. It explores what problems computers can solve and how quickly.

She has also worked on specific topics like:

• Active learning: A way for computers to learn more efficiently. They do this by choosing the most helpful information to learn from.
• Kernel methods: These are mathematical tools. They help computers find hidden patterns in complex data.

Nina Balcan is also a leader in the computer science community. She has helped organize big conferences. For example, she was a program committee co-chair for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 2016. She also helped lead the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in 2020. In 2021, she was the general chair for ICML. This means she was in charge of the whole conference.

Awards and Special Recognitions

Nina Balcan has received many important awards for her work. These awards show how much her contributions are valued in the field of computer science.

• In 2011, she became a Microsoft Faculty Fellow.
• In 2014, she received a Sloan Research Fellowship. This award supports promising young scientists.
• In 2015, she was named a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow.

One of her biggest honors was the 2019 Grace Murray Hopper Award. This award came from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She received it for her "foundational and breakthrough contributions to minimally-supervised learning." This means she developed important new ideas in how computers can learn with very little help.

In 2021, she was recognized as a Simons Investigator. This is a special honor for top researchers.

Most recently, in 2023, Nina Balcan was named an ACM Fellow. This is one of the highest honors in computing. It recognized her important work in the basic ideas of machine learning. It also recognized how she applied these ideas to areas like economics and designing new computer programs. In 2025, she was also elected an AAAI Fellow. This means she is recognized as a top expert by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.