Biography
Salman Avestimehr is a Dean's Professor, the inaugural director of the
USC-Amazon Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning (Trusted AI), and director of the
Information Theory and Machine Learning (vITAL) research lab. He is also the CEO and co-founder of
FedML. He was also an Amazon Scholar in 2021. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2003. He was an Assistant Professor at the ECE school of Cornell University from 2009 to 2013. He was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Mathematics of Information (CMI) at Caltech in 2008. His research interests are in the areas of information theory, machine learning, distributed computing, secure and private learning/computing, and federated learning.
Dr. Avestimehr has received various awards for his research and teaching, including The 2019 IEEE Information Theory Society James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award, an Information Theory Society and Communication Society Joint Paper Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, a Young Investigator Program (YIP) award from the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize, and several Best Paper Awards at Conferences. He has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He was a general Co-Chair of the 2020 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). He is also a Fellow of IEEE.
