ECE Welcomes New Faculty Member Sanghamitra Dutta

machine learning

The University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering welcomes Sanghamitra Dutta as a new assistant professor in the department.

Prior to joining UMD, she was a senior research associate at JPMorgan Chase AI Research in the Explainable AI Centre of Excellence (XAI CoE). She received her Ph.D. and master’s from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and her B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Her research interests broadly revolve around reliable, and trustworthy machine learning. She is particularly interested in addressing the challenges concerning fairness, explainability and law, by bringing in a novel foundational perspective deep-rooted in information theory, causality, and optimization. Her research has been published in both machine learning and information theory venues, featured in New Scientist, and also adopted as part of the fair lending model review at JPMorgan.

In her prior work, she also examined problems in reliable computing, proposing novel algorithmic solutions for large-scale distributed machine learning, using coding theory (an emerging area called “coded computing”). Her results on coded computing address problems in algorithm-based-fault-tolerance that have been open for several decades and have received substantial attention from across disciplines.

She is a recipient of numerous awards, including: the 2022 Simons Institute Fellowship for Causality, the 2021 AG Milnes Outstanding Thesis Award, 2020 Cylab Presidential Fellowship, 2019 K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship, 2019 Axel Berny Presidential Graduate Fellowship, 2017 Tan Endowed Graduate Fellowship, 2016 Prabhu and Poonam Goel Graduate Fellowship, 2015 Nilanjan Ganguly Memorial Award, and the 2014 HONDA Young Engineer and Scientist Award. She has also pursued research internships at IBM Research and Dataminr.

Published August 17, 2022