UC Berkeley Graduate Receives ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

May 15, 2019

Chelsea Finn of the University of California, Berkeley is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation “Learning to Learn with Gradients.” In her thesis, Finn introduced algorithms for meta-learning that enable deep networks to solve new tasks from small datasets, and demonstrated how her algorithms can be applied in areas including computer vision, reinforcement learning and robotics.

Honorable Mentions for the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Ryan Beckett and Tengyu Ma, who both received PhD degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University. Beckett developed new, general and efficient algorithms for creating and validating network control plane configurations in his dissertation, “Network Control Plane Synthesis and Verification.” Tengyu Ma’s dissertation, “Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning: Design, Analysis, and Understanding,” develops novel theory to support new trends in machine learning.

The recipients will be formally recognized at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 15 in San Francisco. The Doctoral Dissertation Award is accompanied by a prize of $20,000, and the Honorable Mention Award is accompanied by a prize totaling $10,000.