Texas ECE PhD student Tianlong Chen has been selected to receive a 2021 IBM PhD Fellowship Award. Chen received his BS in Applied Mathematics from The University of Science and Technology of China in 2017. He began his PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2018 before transferring to the Texas ECE program in 2020. He is supervised in Texas ECE by Prof. Atlas Wang.

The 2021 IBM PhD Fellowship Award Program received hundreds of applications from 183 universities in 32 countries. Applications were reviewed by eminent technologists from across IBM. The award recipients demonstrated academic excellence as well as provided innovative, exceptional research proposals. Sixteen students received IBM PhD Fellowships internationally in 2021, with 9 coming from universities in the United States.

"For 70 years IBM has recognized and rewarded outstanding PhD students around the world through a highly competitive IBM PhD Fellowship Award program," according to IBM. "The distinguished 2021 IBM PhD Fellowship Award recipients demonstrated expertise in pioneering research areas, such as artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud technology, quantum computing, data science, security, and the next generation of cutting-edge processors."

"My overall research focuses on building an accurate, robust, safe, and efficient machine learning system that can be reliably deployed in diverse real-world scenarios, said Chen. "Recently, I am working on extreme sparse neural networks with undamaged trainability, expressivity, and transferability."