Three assistant professors in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering have been named winners of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. Paul Gölz, Ziv Scully, and Soroosh Shafiee were chosen on the strength of their research proposals in addition to their “potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”
The CAREER Award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty. Awards vary in amount, but generally total at least $400,000 and cover a five-year period.
Gölz’s CAREER proposal (“Responsiveness to Heterogeneous Preferences in AI Alignment and Deployment”) explores a challenge that has become increasingly important as artificial intelligence systems are used by millions of people with different values, priorities and opinions. Most current AI systems are trained by combining feedback from many users into a single set of preferences, effectively treating everyone as though they share the same views. Gölz’s research asks whether AI systems can do a better job of recognizing and responding to the fact that people often disagree about what they want from technology.
