Biography:Lester Mackey

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Short description: American computer scientist and statistician
Lester Wayne Mackey II
Born
Long Island, NY, USA
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Princeton
Scientific career
FieldsMachine learning
Computer science
Statistics
InstitutionsMicrosoft Research
Stanford University
ThesisMatrix Factorization and Matrix Concentration (2012)
Doctoral advisorMichael I. Jordan
Websitehttps://web.stanford.edu/~lmackey

Lester Mackey is an American computer scientist and statistician. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. Mackey develops machine learning methods, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from climate forecasting, healthcare, and the social good. He was named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.[1]

Early life and education

Mackey grew up in Long Island.[2] He has said that, as a teenager, the Ross Mathematics Program in number theory introduced him to proof-based mathematics, where he learned about induction and rigorous proof.[2] He got his first taste of academic research at the Research Science Institute.[2] He joined Princeton University as an undergraduate student, where he earned his BSE in Computer Science. There he conducted research with Maria Klawe and David Walker.[3] Mackey was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in Computer Science (2012) and an MA in Statistics (2011).[1][4] At Berkeley, his dissertation, advised by Michael I. Jordan, included work on sparse principal components analysis (PCA) for gene expression modeling, low-rank matrix completion for recommender systems, robust matrix factorization for video surveillance, and concentration inequalities for matrices.[5] After Berkeley, he joined Stanford University, first as a postdoctoral fellow working with Emmanuel Candès and then as an assistant professor of statistics and, by courtesy, computer science. At Stanford, he created the Statistics for Social Good working group.[1]

Research and career

In 2016, Mackey joined Microsoft Research as a researcher and was appointed as an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He was made a principal researcher in 2019.[1]

Mackey's early work developed a method to predict progression rates of people with ALS. He used the PRO-ACT database of clinical trial data and Bayesian inference to predict disease prognosis.[1] He has also developed machine learning models for subseasonal climate and weather forecasting, to more accurately predict temperature and precipitation 2-6 weeks in advance.[1] His models outperform the operational, physics-based dynamical models used by the United States Bureau of Reclamation.[1]

Awards and honors

  • 2003 Intel Science Talent Search National Winner[6]
  • Namesake of minor planet 15093 Lestermackey[7]
  • 2006 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship[8]
  • 2007 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award Winner[9]
  • 2007 Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize[10]
  • 2009 Second Place in the $1 million Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering[11][12]
  • 2010 Best Student Paper Award, International Conference on Machine Learning[13]
  • 2012 First Place in the ALS Prediction Prize4Life Challenge for predicting Lou Gehrig's disease progression[14]
  • 2019 Winner of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Subseasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo[15]
  • 2022 Elected to the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies Leadership Academy[16]
  • 2022 Outstanding Paper Award, NeurIPS[17]
  • 2023 Ethel Newbold Prize[18]
  • 2023 Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics[19]
  • 2023 MacArthur Fellowship[1]

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 "Lester Mackey" (in en). https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2023/lester-mackey. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "| Lester Mackey" (in en-US). https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/lester-mackey/. 
  3. ↑ Li, Wendy (2019-10-09). "Conversations with Maya: Lester Mackey" (in en-US). https://www.societyforscience.org/blog/conversations-with-maya-lester-mackey/. 
  4. ↑ "Lester Mackey, Principal Researcher". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/lmackey/. 
  5. ↑ Mackey, Lester (2012). Matrix Factorization and Matrix Concentration (Thesis). UC Berkeley.
  6. ↑ "Top Teen Scientists Honored At Intel Science Talent Search" (in en). 2003-03-11. https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2003/20030311corp.htm. 
  7. ↑ "(15093) Lestermackey" (in en). https://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=15093. 
  8. ↑ "2006 Goldwater Scholars" (in en). https://goldwaterscholarship.gov/2006-scholars/. 
  9. ↑ "2007 Outstanding Undergraduate Award Winners" (in en). https://archive.cra.org/Activities/awards/undergrad/2007.html. 
  10. ↑ Stevens, Ruth (2007-02-24). "Princeton gives highest awards to top students" (in en). https://www.princeton.edu/news/2007/02/24/princeton-gives-highest-awards-top-students. 
  11. ↑ Jackson, Dan (2017-07-07). "The Netflix Prize: How a $1 Million Contest Changed Binge-Watching Forever" (in en). https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/the-netflix-prize. 
  12. ↑ Crowley, Magdalene L. (2017-07-10). "The tale of Lester Mackey's pursuit of the Netflix Prize" (in en). https://eecs.berkeley.edu/news/2017/07/tale-lester-mackeys-pursuit-netflix-prize. 
  13. ↑ "ICML 2010 - Awards" (in en). https://icml.cc/Conferences/2010/awards.html. 
  14. ↑ Zakaib, Gwyneth (2012-11-15). "Contest Winners Offer Solutions for Tracking ALS" (in en). https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/contest-winners-offer-solutions-tracking-als?id=3320. 
  15. ↑ "Teams complete Bureau of Reclamation's Sub-Seasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo — outperforming the baseline forecasts" (in en). 2019-03-07. https://web.archive.org/web/20190929013341/https://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/newsrelease/detail.cfm?RecordID=64969. 
  16. ↑ "ASA Community" (in en). https://community.amstat.org/. 
  17. ↑ Chairs 2023, Communications (2022-11-21). "Announcing the NeurIPS 2022 Awards – NeurIPS Blog" (in en-US). https://blog.neurips.cc/2022/11/21/announcing-the-neurips-2022-awards/. 
  18. ↑ "Bernoulli Society News". https://www.bernoullisociety.org/news. 
  19. ↑ "Institute of Mathematical Statistics | 2023 IMS Fellows Announced" (in en). https://imstat.org/2023/05/02/2023-ims-fellows-announced/. 



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