Institute of Mathematical Statistics | Cynthia Rudin wins $1 million Artificial Intelligence Prize, a ‘New Nobel’

Cynthia Rudin wins $1 million Artificial Intelligence Prize, a ‘New Nobel’

February 16, 2022

IMS and ASA Fellow Cynthia Rudin has won the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). This award, the most prestigious in the field of artificial intelligence, is comparable to the Nobel Prize and the Turing Award. It carries a monetary reward at the million-dollar level.

Rudin’s citation reads, “For pioneering scientific work in the area of interpretable and transparent AI systems in real-world deployments, the advocacy for these features in highly sensitive areas such as social justice and medical diagnosis, and serving as a role model for researchers and practitioners.”

Cynthia Rudin is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, statistical science, mathematics, and biostatistics & bioinformatics at Duke University, and directs the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab. Previously, Rudin held positions at MIT, Columbia, and NYU. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University at Buffalo, and a PhD from Princeton University. Rudin is also a three-time winner of the INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Award, was named as one of the “Top 40 Under 40” by Poets and Quants in 2015, and was named by Businessinsider.com as one of the 12 most impressive professors at MIT in 2015. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and AAAI.

Prof. Rudin is past chair of both the INFORMS Data Mining Section and the ASA’s Statistical Learning and Data Science Section. She has also served on committees for DARPA, the National Institute of Justice, AAAI, and ACM SIGKDD. She has served on three committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, including the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, the Committee on Law and Justice, and the Committee on Analytic Research Foundations for the Next-Generation Electric Grid. She has given keynote/invited talks at several conferences including KDD (twice), AISTATS, CODE, Machine Learning in Healthcare (MLHC), Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML), ECML-PKDD, and the Nobel Conference.