Mark A. Davenport has been named as one out of 126 U.S. and Canadian researchers, representing eight scientific fields, to receive a 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship.

An assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2012, Davenport received his fellowship in the area of mathematics and will use the award in support of his work in developing mathematical models and algorithms for tackling the kinds of inverse problems that arise in many common signal processing and machine learning problems as a result of incomplete data and nonlinear observations.

Davenport's approach to these problems centers on the use of low-dimensional structure like sparsity and low-rank matrices to help tease the underlying information out of such limited sources of data. Applications where these kinds of problems arise range from the design of hyper-efficient sensing systems to personalized medicine and intelligent tutoring systems.

At Georgia Tech, Davenport is a member of the Center for Signal and Information Processing, one of the world’s most preeminent groups of signal processing researchers, and is a founding member of the Center for Machine Learning, an interdisciplinary group of faculty from engineering, computer science, and mathematics that includes many leading figures in the machine learning community. He is the recipient of both a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Air Force of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award.

The Sloan Research Fellowships, awarded yearly since 1955, honor early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as the next generation of scientific leaders. Past Sloan Research Fellows include many towering scientific figures, including physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, and game theorist John Nash. A full list of the 2017 Fellows may be viewed at https://sloan.org/fellowships/2017-Fellows.