ECE Assistant Professor, Kangwook Lee wins exclusive KSEA Young Investigator Grant

Kangwook Lee, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the recipient of a Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association Young Investigator Grant. Each year, the grants recognize one engineer and one scientist who have demonstrated outstanding early career development.

Lee’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and information and coding theory, with a focus on designing trustworthy and scalable machine learning algorithms and systems. One of his papers on coded computation is the most cited paper in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory between 2016 and 2020, and also won the 2020 IEEE Joint ComSoc/ITSoc Paper Award.

Lee has also served as Area Chair for NeurIPS, Program Committee for Machine Learning and Systems and Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Lee plans to use the grant to investigate “Information-theoretic Approaches to Federated Fair Learning.” The goal of the research is to develop a novel, interdisciplinary mix of intellectual tools from information theory, machine learning and optimization to design next generation federated fair learning algorithms with provable guarantees.