Post Date: Post Date – 11:01 AM, Tuesday – Nov 8
New York: Pavithra Prabhakar, an Indian-American computer science professor at Kansas State University, won an Amazon Research Award for designing a tool that minimizes negative user experiences.
Prabhakar is the Peggy and Gary Edwards Chair of Engineering and is one of 74 recipients of Amazon’s award, which also includes unrestricted gifts, access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and Amazon Web Services labor Intelligence and machine learning services and tools.
The tools Prabhakar designed will be used to minimize disruptive changes to the user experience of machine learning-based software systems as the product continues to be refined and retrained.
“The broad goal of this project is to automatically characterize how similar or different two versions of a machine learning-based system are,” Prabhakar said.
She further stated that while these systems are regularly retrained to achieve superior performance, that often doesn’t translate into a better user experience.
“This can be mitigated by equipping the design team with an automated tool that highlights where and how much the system has changed between versions, helping the team to make decisions about the acceptability of the change from a user experience standpoint, ” Prabhakar explained.
The automated tool will help design teams make critical decisions about improving the user experience of intelligent machine learning-based software systems, according to a Kansas State University press statement.
Prabhakar received his PhD in Computer Science and MS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Mathematics of Information at Caltech.
She was named a Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone Research Scholar and received a Research Excellence Award from the Dean of the Carl R Ice School of Engineering.
Prabhakar’s research has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the NSF Career Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Union.
