Biography

Salman Avestimehr is a Dean's Professor, the inaugural director of the USC-Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learning (Trusted AI), and the director of the Information Theory and Machine Learning (vITAL) research lab at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Southern California. He is also the co-founder and CEO of FedML. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 and M.S. degree in 2005 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2003. His research interests include information theory, decentralized and federated machine learning, secure and privacy-preserving learning and computing.

Dr. Avestimehr has received a number of awards for his research, including the James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award from IEEE Information Theory Society, an Information Theory Society and Communication Society Joint Paper Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House (President Obama), a Young Investigator Program (YIP) award from the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize, and several Best Paper Awards at Conferences and Workshops. He has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a general Co-Chair of the 2020 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT). He was an Amazon Scholar in Alexa AI in 2021. He is also a fellow of IEEE.