The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is pleased to announce that Professor Chi has been named the 2021 Goldsmith Lecturer. The ITSoc recently endowed the Goldsmith Lecturer Program with a generous gift by Dr. Andrea Goldsmith. The award provides travel support for an outstanding early-career woman researcher to deliver a lecture at one of the ITSoc’s Schools of Information Theory, held for the benefit of students and postdoctoral researchers. By highlighting technical achievements of early career women, the ITSoc Goldsmith Lecturer Program helps the award recipients build their professional career and recognition. The Lectureship contributes to the public visibility of the researcher and helps increase the diversity of IEEE ITSoc and IEEE as a whole, as women are an under-represented group in both. The award recipient will also serve as a role model and inspiration to diverse students attending the Information Theory Schools.

Yuejie Chi is an Associate Professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering  and a faculty affiliate with the Machine Learning department and CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University, where she held the Robert E. Doherty Early Career Development Professorship from 2018 to 2020. Among others, Dr. Chi is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the inaugural IEEE Signal Processing Society Early Career Technical Achievement Award for contributions to high-dimensional structured signal processing.  Her research interests lie in the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of data science, signal processing, machine learning and inverse problems, using a mixture of tools from high-dimensional statistics, information theory, optimization theory and harmonic analysis. Most recently, she is interested in designing preconditioned first-order methods to accelerate nonconvex statistical estimation, and understanding the computational and statistical efficiencies of reinforcement learning.  Professor Chi will deliver her lecture at the inaugural IEEE East Asian School of Information Theory held August 3- 6 2021 that will be offered online.   

The IEEE Information Theory Society gratefully acknowledges the financial support from following corporate sponsors to the Goldsmith Lecturer Program: Gold Sponsors Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm; Silver Sponsors Assia, Interdigital; and Bronze Sponsors Google, Keysight, Microsoft, Texas Instruments.