Wu Tapped for Prestigious Okawa Grant

Steven Wu, assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research, is among the latest recipients of the Okawa Research Grant, which is awarded by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications.

Founded 25 years ago, the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications is a non-profit organization in Japan whose mission is to provide funding for and give recognition to new studies in the information and telecommunications fields, to conduct surveys, analyses and collection of information, and to nurture human resources.

The grants sponsor research in the United States, China, Japan and Korea in eight topic areas pertaining to information and telecommunications. One of only seven U.S. recipients this year, Wu’s research explores ways in which machine learning algorithms can be better aligned with societal values -- most notably privacy and fairness.

The grant will support his work on the development of novel techniques and algorithms that protect users’ data privacy in the context of machine learning. His work thus far has been prominently featured at numerous journals  and conferences, including the PNAS, Operations Research, NeurIPS, ICML, STOC, EC, and CHI. Wu completed his Ph.D. in computer science in 2017 at the University of Pennsylvania, where his doctoral dissertation received Penn's Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award for best thesis.