Congratulations to Benjamin Recht, assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for receiving the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research in the field of statistics and machine learning.

From the website:

Recht is being honored for his significant contributions to the field of data science, an area of research that combines statistics (the analysis of large amounts of numerical data), computer science, and mathematics. A common problem in the modern world is that there is lots of data but it is usually incomplete. Recht’s work has been particularly valuable in a broad area of mathematics that uses assumptions to reconstruct data—matrix completion and nuclear normal minimization. His seminal papers on matrix completion, written with Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University, Maryam Fazel of the University of Washington and Pablo Parrilo of MIT, have been cited more than 2,000 times and have contributed to fields ranging from machine learning to astronomical imaging.