Benjamin Recht

Benjamin Recht is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ben received his BS in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and his MS and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory.

After completing his doctoral work, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Mathematics of Information at Caltech. He is the recipient of a NSF Career Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization.

Program Visits

Modern Paradigms in Generalization, Fall 2024, Visiting Scientist

Causality, Spring 2022, Visiting Scientist

Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling, Fall 2021, Visiting Scientist

Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference, Fall 2021, Visiting Scientist

Theory of Reinforcement Learning, Fall 2020, Visiting Scientist

Foundations of Deep Learning, Summer 2019, Visiting Scientist

Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization, Fall 2017, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer

Foundations of Machine Learning, Spring 2017, Visiting Scientist

Algorithms and Uncertainty, Fall 2016, Visiting Scientist

Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis, Fall 2013, Visiting Scientist