WNCG student Matthew Faw was one of two Texas ECE PhD students selected as 2020-2021 recipients of UT NXP Foundation Fellowship awards. The NXP Foundation Fellowship program provides one-year fellowships to support third or fourth year PhD students pursuing research in machine learning, artificial intelligence, millimeter wave radar and advanced microprocessing or microcomputing technology.
The NXP Foundation aims "to develop strong youth STEM programs and encourage innovation that makes a difference in the world."
"The NXP Foundation is committed to building STEM education at the highest levels of academic inquiry, research, collaboration and pursuit. We could not be more excited to support exceptional scholars focused on game changing innovation and technology that advances society and makes our world a better place. Right now, these future innovators at UT Austin are developing critically important talents and visions of extraordinary potential, and NXP is honored to help Rasha and Matthew realize these goals,” said Danielle Alexandra, Chair of the NXP Foundation.
“The support provided by the NXP Foundation is an essential ingredient in providing our students with an environment for unleashing their creative potential and truly impacting the world in meaningful ways,” said Diana Marculecu, chair of Texas ECE. “We are grateful that the NXP Foundation has chosen Texas ECE and our students as a means to further their mission, and we are looking forward to continuing this partnership in the future.”
Matthew Faw received a BSE in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics from Duke University in 2017. He joined Texas ECE in Fall 2018, and he is supervised by Prof. Constantine Caramanis and Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai as part of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG).
"Matthew has a superb technical background, and is very strong analytically," said Prof. Constantine Caramanis. "Perhaps more importantly, he is a creative researcher, able to see connections between different areas. His work tackles a problem of central interest in Artificial Intelligence -- how can we build algorithms that will do well on data we have not yet seen? His work thus far has developed techniques from Monte Carlo Tree Search to address this problem head on."
"Matthew is very collaborative, and works well with others," said Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai. "Thus, we expect him to have a great career ahead!"
“I am extremely grateful to the NXP Foundation for offering this fellowship to me,” said Matthew Faw. “With the support of this fellowship, I plan to explore how ideas in differential privacy and invariant risk minimization can be used to design domain adaptation algorithms with provable generalization guarantees. I really enjoy working on problems that combine ideas from different research areas, so I hope to use the fellowship to meet new collaborators and find fun new applications for and perspectives on my work.”
Along with Faw, Texas ECE student Rasha El-Jaroudi also received the award.
The NXP Foundation is very proud to announce the launch of the NXP Fellowships to be implemented at Universities across the United States and Europe commencing with Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, Global Headquarters of NXP and the University of Texas Austin and Texas Tech University, at NXP's Texas US Headquarters.
"NXP Foundation looks forward to furthering our relationship with the University of Texas and the PhD program in advanced STEM," said Ms. Alexandra, NXP Foundation Chair.