Roni Rosenfeld is an

Israeli-American , native_name_lang = , image = , caption = , population = 110,000–150,000 , popplace = New York metropolitan area, Los Angeles metropolitan area, Miami metropolitan area, and other large metropolitan are ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and computational epidemiologist, currently serving as the head of th
Machine Learning Department
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 ...

. He is an international expert in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, infectious disease forecasting,

statistical language modeling A language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words. Given any sequence of words of length , a language model assigns a probability P(w_1,\ldots,w_m) to the whole sequence. Language models generate probabilities by training on ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

Education

Rosenfeld received his B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

in 1985. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994. While a graduate student, he developed and open-sourced a statistical language-modeling toolkit to allow anyone to create statistical language models from their own corpora and experiment with and extend the toolkit's capabilities. The toolkit has been used by more than 100 NLP laboratories in more than 20 countries. Rosenfeld's Ph.D. thesis, ''A Maximum Entropy Approach to Adaptive Statistical Language Modeling'', was advised by

Raj Reddy Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born 13 June 1937) is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mello ...

and

Xuedong Huang Xuedong D. Huang (born October 20, 1962) is a Chinese American computer scientist and technology executive who has made contributions to spoken language processing and AI Cognitive Services. He is Microsoft's Technical Fellow and Chief Technology ...

and won the 2001 Computer, Speech and Language award for "Most Influential Paper in the Last 5 Years."

Career

Shortly after receiving his Ph.D., Rosenfeld joined the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science as an assistant professor. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1999 and received tenure in 2001. In 2005 he was promoted to professor of language technologies, machine learning computer science and computational biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Rosenfeld also holds adjunct appointments at the

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is a medical school of the University of Pittsburgh, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The School of Medicine, also known as Pitt Med, is consistently ranked as a "Top Medical School" by '' ...

, department of computational and systems biology. From 2002 to 2003, Rosenfeld was a visiting professor at the

University of Hong Kong The University of Hong Kong (HKU) (Chinese: 香港大學) is a public research university in Hong Kong. Founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, it is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong. HKU was also the fi ...

. Rosenfeld is the director of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning for Social Good (ML4SG) program. He has held educational leadership positions in a variety of programs, including the M.S. in computational finance (1997–1999), graduate computational and statistical learning (2001–2003), M.S. in machine learning (2017) and undergraduate minor in machine learning. Rosenfeld was appointed Head of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department in 2018.

Research

Rosenfeld's research interests include epidemiological forecasting, information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), and machine learning for social good.

Epidemiological forecasting

Rosenfeld is a world expert in epidemiological forecasting. He founded and directs the Delphi research group, which has won most of the epidemiological forecasting challenges organized by the U.S.

CDC The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the National public health institutes, national public health agency of the United States. It is a Federal agencies of the United States, United States federal agency, under the United S ...

and other U.S. government agencies. In December 2016, the

named his group the "Most Accurate Forecaster" for 2015–2016, and in October 2017, the Delphi group's two systems took the top two spots in the 2016-2017 flu forecasting challenge. The CDC recognized Rosenfeld's Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University as having contributed the most accurate national-, regional-, and state-level influenza-like illness forecasts and national-level hospitalization forecasts to the site. In 2019, the CDC recognized forecasts provided by the Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon as having been the most accurate for five seasons in a row, and named the Delphi group an Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence, a five-year designation that includes $3 million in research funding. Rosenfeld describes his forecasting research goal as "to make epidemiological forecasting as universally accepted and useful as weather forecasting is today." His recent work in the area has focused on selecting high value epidemiological forecasting targets (e.g.

Influenza Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses. Symptoms range from mild to severe and often include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. These symptoms ...

and

Dengue Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne tropical disease caused by the dengue virus. Symptoms typically begin three to fourteen days after infection. These may include a high fever, headache, vomiting, muscle and joint pains, and a characteristic ...

); creating baseline forecasting methods for them; establishing metrics for measuring and tracking forecasting accuracy; estimating the limits of forecastability for each target; and identifying new sources of data that could be helpful to the forecasting goal.

Honors and awards

*2017 Joel and Ruth Spira Teaching Award *2017 CDC Influenza Forecasting Challenge "Most Accurate Forecaster" *1992 Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence

References

External links

Roni Rosenfeld at Carnegie Mellon

Flu Season is Here Why Didn't We See It Coming via Wired

Flu Season Comes Around Computer Scientists Prepare & Make Predictions via WESA

AI Helping Turn the Tide Against Flu in 2 Important Ways via NBCNews

When Will Flu Season Be Worst? These Researchers Think They Might Know via NewsWeek

How Bad Will the Flu Season Get? Forecasters Are Competing to Figure it Out via The Scientist

CMU Receives 1M from Chicago Software Company to Fund Machine Learning Projects via Triblive

How funny messages from ‘Polly’ can fight Ebola via Futurity

CMU Researchers Fine Tune Flu Season Forecasting via CampusTechnology

CMU is the world's best at predicting influenza activity via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

How a Drunken Chipmunk Voice Helps Send a Public Service Message via NPR

Phone game helps illiterate Pakistanis find employment via The Tartan
*
Carnegie Mellon flu forecasting named CDC center of excellence via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rosenfeld, Roni Tel Aviv University alumni Carnegie Mellon University faculty Machine learning researchers American people of Israeli descent 1959 births Living people