EECS faculty continues to make big news in the outside world! Michael Jordan, the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in EECS and the Department of Statistics, has been named a Plenary Lecturer at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro this August. This is an honor that has been bestowed upon a very small handful of computer scientists over the 100-year history of the ICM. (For the uninitiated, a plenary lecturer is one who gives his or her talk to all attendees of a conference at once. It’s a pretty huge deal.)

Here is the list of plenary speakers at the ICM 2018 Conference.

The title of Prof. Jordan’s speech will be “Dynamical, Symplectic and Stochastic Perspectives on Gradient-Based Optimization” and will cover some of the lines of theoretical research in the RISELab.

Past plenary speakers are a who’s who of the luminaries of 20th century mathematics, which includes the incredible minds of Borel, Minkowski, Cantor, Poincare, Banach, von Neuman, Wiener, and Geodal.

Congratulations to Professor Jordan! The RISELab rises!