Assistant Professor Dr. Mengdi Huai received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the highest honor awarded to junior faculty. She has received a $549,938 grant to support research and educational activities for her research, starting August 1st.
The National Science Foundation CAREER awards are the most prestigious awards given in support of early-career junior faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and lead advances in the mission of their department. The awards are presented once each year, including a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years.
Dr. Huai’s proposal “CAREER: Enabling Reliable Uncertainty-Aware Decision Making with Unreliable Data” works with conformal inference, a statistical distribution-free and model-agnostic technique that offers statistically rigorous measures of uncertainty for individual predictions, so that it can better handle unreliable data and enhance its effectiveness in real-world uncertainty studies. As a result, researchers and practitioners will be empowered to integrate predictive uncertainties into data mining and machine learning, which will enable more informed and reliable decision-making to advance scientific discovery. A customized education component will be developed and implemented to attract students and engage them in formal inference and data science research.
Dr. Huai is the 9th faculty member of the department to receive this distinction.