News Release

ECE PHD STUDENT RECEIVES 2017-19 MICROSOFT FELLOWSHIP

San Diego, CA, February 3, 2017---The department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California, San Diego is very pleased to announce that ECE Ph.D. student Bita Darvish Rouhani has been awarded the 2017 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. Bita is a member of the Adaptive Computing and Embedded Systems lab advised by Professor Farinaz Koushanfar. She received her M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University (2015) and her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (2013). Her research interests include low-power computing, distributed optimization, big-data analytics, and deep learning.  

“My research aims to address the challenges associated with big data analytics using a combination of hardware and software-based approaches. Analyzing massive and densely correlated data is an omnipresent trend on different computing platforms ranging from smartphones and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to personal computers and cloud servers.”

This fellowship gives Bita the unique opportunity to collaborate with world-class researchers at Microsoft. It will further expand her research work towards building holistic automated computing systems for end-to-end deployment of practical real-world applications.

“There are at least two major sets of challenges that need to be addressed simultaneously. One set of hurdles deals with the resource and/or application constraints such as real-time requirement, available energy, or memory. The other set of challenges arises due to the complexity of the underlying learning tasks. This complexity, in turn, makes it necessary to go beyond traditional linear or polynomial analytical approaches to reach a certain level of accuracy.”

BIta’s work addresses these two critical aspects of emerging computing scenarios by designing and building holistic solutions and tools that are both data and platform aware. Her solutions simultaneously capture the best of the Computer Architecture and Machine Learning fields, bridging the gap between theory and implementation.

The Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship will cover Bita’s tuition and fees for two academic years (2017-18 and 2018-19) and will provide her with a stipend for living expenses as well as a conference and travel allowance. The funding from the fellowship will enable her to envision longer-term research goals and more freely explore different research directions and ideas.

About UC San Diego

The University of California San Diego is a leading university in mixed-signal, microwave and mm-wave RFICs, digital communications, applied electromagnetics, signal/image processing, machine learning, optics and nano-electronics research. UC San Diego recently ranked fifth in the nation with an annual research budget exceeding $1 billion. The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering ranks #8 in the USA according to the U.S. News & World Report best global universities ranking published in October 2016. The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is led by 55 faculty members and trains more than 650 graduate students per year.

For more information, please visit ece.ucsd.edu.

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Media Contacts

Shannon Prior
Electrical and Computer Engineering
858-534-2222
sprior@ucsd.edu