ORFE graduate students Yihong Gu and Irina Wang received a SEAS Award for Excellence. This annual award recognizes advanced graduate students in SEAS who have performed at the highest levels as scholars and researchers.
Yihong, advised by Professor Jianqing Fan, works on the stability and interpretability of deep neural networks via developing robust statistical algorithms and feature selections in the neural predictions. Yihong advances statistical modeling using neural networks for high-dimensional and causal inferences. Irina, advised by Professor Bartolomeo Stellato, focuses her research on decision-making under uncertainty (e.g., energy demand, traffic conditions), a crucial component across diverse fields of science and engineering, including operations research, transportation, and robotics. Irina uses machine learning to model the effects of uncertainty in order to make high-quality provably-safe decisions. Besides the significant methodological contributions, she is also developing an open-source software package to easily disseminate her research to a non-technical audience.