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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Giulia Fanti, Guannan Qu, and Akshitha Sriraman, all assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering, the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a prestigious five-year grant given to junior faculty for research and education.

Fanti’s research focuses on systems that enable cooperation in limited-trust environments, with applications to some of the most pressing problems facing society today, including cybercrime, financial inclusion, and climate change. A major technical challenge in her work stems from its inherently multidisciplinary nature, drawing on distributed systems, networking, machine learning, security, privacy, and information theory.

Qu’s research aims to develop theories that make machine learning applicable in real-world, large scale engineering systems. With an interdisciplinary focus, Qu is establishing new mathematical tools in machine/reinforcement learning, control theory, optimization, and network science and applies these tools to cyber physical systems, power systems, transportation systems, and robotics.

Sriraman’s research bridges computer architecture and software systems, with a focus on making hyperscale data center systems more efficient, sustainable, and equitable via solutions that span the systems stack. Her work has developed the software and hardware foundations of hyperscale data center systems that support modern web services, such as web search, video streaming, and online healthcare.