UCLA Computer Scientist Aditya Grover Honored with Prestigious Early Career AI Award

UCLA’s Aditya Grover Honored with Prestigious Early Career AI Award

Aditya Grover, assistant professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been awarded the Computers and Thought Award. This annual honor from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence recognizes early career researchers who have made significant contributions to artificial intelligence.

Grover earned this recognition for his foundational work combining deep generative models, representation learning, and reinforcement learning. His research advances scientific reasoning by developing AI systems capable of interacting and making decisions with limited supervision.

Research Focus and Leadership

Grover leads UCLA’s Machine Intelligence group, focusing on the intersection of generative models and sequential decision-making. His work aims to enhance AI’s ability to reason through complex tasks without extensive human input.

He is also the co-founder of Inception, a company developing parallelizable large language models optimized for quality, speed, and cost-efficiency. Additionally, Grover contributes to sustainability efforts in computer science through the ML4Climate initiative.

Recent Awards and Recognitions

• In 2024, Grover secured a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, receiving $500,000 over five years for research on generative AI models.
• He was named a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow, awarded up to $300,000 for interdisciplinary AI research focused on aligning AI systems with human values by 2050.
• Grover appeared on Forbes’ 2024 30 Under 30 list in science and was designated a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.
• Since joining UCLA Samueli in 2021, he has received several awards including an Amazon Research Award, Samsung’s AI Researcher of the Year Award, a Google Award for Inclusion Research, and a Meta Research Award.
• Notably, UCLA Samueli professor Guy Van den Broeck also received the Computers and Thought Award in 2019.

As the 2025 award recipient, Grover will present his research at the upcoming International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence meeting in Montreal, Canada.

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