Padhraic Smyth Named IEEE Fellow

The IEEE Fellow Class of 2024 has been announced, and UC Irvine’s Padhraic Smyth, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, is among the select group of individuals honored with this distinction. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation, and Smyth was recognized for outstanding contributions to machine learning and data science.

“As with many of these types of individual awards,” says Smyth, “the real story is the great support behind the scenes from colleagues, staff, and students, all of which I very much appreciate through my years at UCI.”

As Associate (and Founding) Director of UC Irvine’s Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, Smyth has led a wide variety of machine learning projects, exploring both the foundational principles of machine learning algorithms, as well as leading the development of machine learning for important societal problems in areas such as climate science and medicine. Among his recent research interests is a project that aims to better understand various trade-offs in how humans and machine learning models can better collaborate. This is joint work with the UCI Cognitive Science Department, funded by the National Science Foundation. Among the questions he and his research group are pursing are: do machine learning models know what they don’t know, and can human and machine learning predictions be combined to be more accurate than either?

Smyth is also Co-Director of the HPI Research Center in Machine Learning and Data Science at UCI and an affiliate faculty member of the UCI Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology (CREATE).

Other IEEE Fellows from UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) include Pierre Baldi, Michael Carey, Michael Franz, Michael Goodrich, Ramesh Jain, Cristina Lopes, Sharad Mehrotra, Alexandru Nicolau, Marios Papaefthymiou and Gene Tsudik.

— Shani Murray