Maria-Florina (Nina) Balcan is a Romanian-American computer scientist whose research investigates machine learning,

algorithmic game theory Algorithmic game theory (AGT) is an area in the intersection of game theory and computer science, with the objective of understanding and design of algorithms in strategic environments. Typically, in Algorithmic Game Theory problems, the input t ...

, theoretical computer science, including active learning, kernel methods, random-sampling mechanisms and envy-free pricing. She is an associate professor of computer science at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Education

Balcan is originally from Romania, and earned a bachelor's degree in 2000 from the University of Bucharest, earning ''

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

'' honors with a double major in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and computer science. She continued at the University of Bucharest for a master's degree in computer science in 2002, and then earned a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in computer science in 2008 from

where her research was supervised by

Avrim Blum Avrim Blum (born 27 May 1966) is a computer scientist. In 2007, he was made a List of Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to learning theory and algorithms." Blu ...

Career and research

After working as a postdoctoral researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

New England, she was appointed assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing in 2009. She returned to Carnegie Mellon as a tenured faculty member in 2014. Balcan served as program committee co-chair for three major machine learning conferences, including COLT 2014, the

International Conference on Machine Learning The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificia ...

(ICML) 2016, and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020. She is the general chair for ICML 2021.

Awards and honors

Balcan is a Microsoft Faculty Fellow (2011), a

Sloan Research Fellow The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

(2014) and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (2015). She was awarded the 2019

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or serv ...

by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

(ACM), for her "foundational and breakthrough contributions to minimally-supervised learning". She is a 2021

Simons Simons is a surname of Scandinavian origins and a variant of Sigmundsson, a patronymic surname with roots in proto-Germanic ''*segaz'' and ''*mundō'', giving a rough translation of "protection through victory". Notable people A * Alan ...

Investigator.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Balcan, Maria-Florina Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Romanian computer scientists American computer scientists Romanian women computer scientists American women computer scientists Romanian emigrants to the United States University of Bucharest alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Georgia Tech faculty Carnegie Mellon University faculty Sloan Research Fellows