A large audience and a panel of experts at Gravitational Waves event.

UMD Computer Scientist Soheil Feizi Receives Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

/ 14 January 2025 /

The prestigious award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers who are early in their careers.

 

A University of Maryland expert in machine learning is one of 400 scientists and engineers nationwide honored today by President Biden for their exceptional potential for leadership and novel research undertaken early in their scientific careers.

Soheil Feizi headshot
Soheil Feizi. Photo courtesy of same.

Soheil Feizi, an associate professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is the latest recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government up-and-coming researchers.

Feizi is a renowned expert in the field of reliable and trustworthy AI. His innovative work has appeared in The Washington Post, BBC, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, and Wired. He recently founded and is the CEO of RELAI, a company whose mission is to make AI reliability accessible and achievable for everyone.

“I’m truly honored by this recognition and am grateful to my amazing students, colleagues, and mentors who made this possible,” Feizi says. “I look forward to building on this momentum to continue pushing the boundaries of AI and making it more trustworthy and impactful for everyone.”

Feizi, a core faculty member in the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning, is also a strong advocate for equity and inclusion in science and technology. He was the driving force for establishing the Rising Stars in Machine Learning program, now in its sixth year. The annual event is designed to empower and engage early-stage researchers from underrepresented backgrounds in computer science and machine learning.

He is also active in the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), where he collaborates with other TRAILS faculty on projects like investigating text-to-image generative AI models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, focusing on myriad legal, aesthetic and computational aspects that are currently unresolved.

In 2024, Feizi contributed to the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence's report, which released its findings in December.    

The PECASE award is but one of several significant honors that Feizi has received since arriving to the University of Maryland in 2018.

Last year, he was the recipient of the Army Research Office’s Early Career Program Award. The award supported his efforts to develop provable methods that can improve the robustness of dynamic AI systems.

In 2022, Feizi received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award to advance artificial intelligence agents that can robustly interact with humans and perform various tasks with minimal supervision.

And in 2020, he received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for a project intended to study deep generative models.

Feizi earned his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2016.

—Story by UMIACS communications group

About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences

The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 10,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college's 10 departments and nine interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $250 million.