Two from LIDS awarded AI2050 Early Career Fellowships

LIDS PIs Gabriele Farina and Marzyeh Ghassemi are among 25 scholars named by Schmidt Sciences to receive AI2050 Fellowships. The AI2050 program asks researchers to imagine the year 2050, where AI has been hugely beneficial, and to pursue projects that help society realize this goal. The program funds senior researchers and early career scholars for two years to address a wide range of global challenges in AI. Early Career Fellows are awarded funding for a two year project that advances their research along with other non-monetary support to help them continue their work and amplify its results.  

For his AI2050 project, Farina will focus on imperfect-information games, aiming to devise theoretical and practical solutions to balance interpretability and strategic soundness, addressing fundamental blind spots in our current understanding and investigating the application of this technology on testbeds spanning multiple domains.

Ghassemi’s AI2050 project aims to make healthcare AI fairer and more reliable by improving the data used to train these systems. Additionally, this project develops tools to monitor and maintain AI performance as medical practices evolve, keeping the AI safe and effective in real-world use. The goal of this work is to ensure models are accurate and equitable. 

Gabriele Farina is the X-Window Consortium Professor and Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). His research combines techniques and notions of strategic behavior from game theory together with modern tools from machine learning, optimization, and statistics to construct state-of-the-art methods to compute optimal strategies for multiagent interactions. Farina received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his work has been recognized with several awards, including a Best Paper Award at NeurIPS'20 and an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICLR'23. His dissertation was recognized with the 2023 ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award and one of the two 2023 ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mentions, among others.

Marzyeh Ghassemi holds the Germeshausen Career Development Professorship in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES). She is a member of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and holds affiliations with the MIT Jameel Clinic, IDSS, and CSAIL. Ghassemi was named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2024, she received an NSF CAREER award and a Google Research Scholar Award. Prior to her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, she received an MSc. degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering as a Goldwater Scholar at New Mexico State University. Ghassemi's work spans computer science and clinical venues, including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, MLHC, JAMIA, JMIR, JMLR, AMIA-CRI, Nature Medicine, Nature Translational Psychiatry, and Critical Care. Her work has been featured in popular press such as MIT News, The Boston Globe, and The Huffington Post.

Schmidt Sciences is a philanthropic organization that accelerates scientific knowledge and breakthroughs to support a thriving world. Founded in 2024, Schmidt Sciences brings together the science-focused efforts of Eric and Wendy Schmidt, whose philanthropy works toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. The organization prioritizes research in six focus areas poised for revolutionary impact: AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate, science systems and space.

Read the full announcement for the 25 AI2050 Fellows.