Carlos Guestrin

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Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

Carlos Guestrin is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. His previous positions include the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Washington, the Finmeccanica Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Senior Director of Machine Learning and AI at Apple, after the acquisition of Turi, Inc. (formerly GraphLab and Dato) — Carlos co-founded Turi, which developed a platform for developers and data scientist to build and deploy intelligent applications. He is a technical advisor for OctoML.ai. His team also released a number of popular open-source projects, including XGBoost, LIME, Apache TVM, MXNet, Turi Create, GraphLab/PowerGraph, SFrame, and GraphChi.

Carlos received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He is also a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF Career Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and IBM Faculty Fellowship, and was named one of the 2008 ‘Brilliant 10’ by Popular Science Magazine. Carlos’ work received awards at a number of conferences and journals, including ACL, AISTATS, ICML, IPSN, JAIR, JWRPM, KDD, NeurIPS, UAI, and VLDB. He is a former member of the Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) advisory group for DARPA.

Honors and Awards

• Amazon Professorship of Machine Learning
• 2012 IJCAII-JAIR Best Paper runner-up prize in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) for Optimal Value of Information in Graphical Models with Andreas Krause. This prize is awarded to an outstanding paper and a runner-up published in JAIR in the preceding five calendar years.
• Best Paper Award in the Sixteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2010) for Connecting the Dots Between News Articles with Dafna Shahaf.
• Best Student Paper Award in International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2010) for Focused Belief Propagation for Query-Specific Inference with Anton Chechetka.
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), 2009.
• IJCAI 2009 Computers and Thought Award. See the slides and video of the talk.
• Best Research Paper Award from the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management Engineering for Efficient Sensor Placement Optimization for Securing Large Water Distribution Networks with Andreas Krause, Jure Leskovec, Jeanne VanBriesen, and Christos Faloutsos.
• Member of the DARPA Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) advisory group.
• Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science.
• 2008 "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science Magazine.
• ONR Young Investigator Award, (2008).
• Honorable Mention for Outstanding Paper Award in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2007) for Efficient Inference for Distributions on Permutations with Jon Huang and Leo Guibas.
• Best Paper Award in the Thirteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2007) for Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks with Jure Leskovec, Andreas Krause, Christos Faloutsos, Jeanne VanBriesen and Natalie Glance.
• IBM Faculty Fellowship, (2007).
• 2007 IJCAII-JAIR Best Paper prize in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) for Efficient Solution Algorithms for Factored MDPs with Daphne Koller, Ron Parr and Shobha Venkataraman. This prize is awarded to an outstanding paper published in JAIR in the preceding five calendar years.
• NSF CAREER Award, (2007).
• IBM Faculty Fellowship, (2006).
• Best Paper Award in the Fifth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'06) for Near-optimal Sensor Placements: Maximizing Information while Minimizing Communication Cost with Andreas Krause, Anupam Gupta and Jon Kleinberg.
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2006).
• Best Paper Runner-Up Award in the 22^nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2005) for Near-Optimal Sensor Placements in Gaussian Processes with Andreas Krause and Ajit Singh.
• Best Paper Runner-Up Award in 21^st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2005) for Near-Optimal Nonmyopic Value of Information in Graphical Models with Andreas Krause.
• Best Paper Award in the Fourth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'05) for A Robust Architecture for Distributed Inference in Sensor Networks with Mark Paskin and Jim McFadden.
• Best Paper Award in the 30^th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2004) for Model-Driven Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks with Amol Deshpande, Sam Madden, Joseph Hellerstein and Wei Hong.
• Best Paper Award in the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2003) for Max-Margin Markov Networks with Ben Taskar and Daphne Koller.
• Siebel Scholarship, 2009
• Stanford Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, 2000.