Assistant professor Esra Akbas has received a five-year, $500,000 award from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER). A CAREER grant is NSF’s most prestigious award in support of faculty early in their careers. The program aims to support young faculty who show potential to make a lasting impact in research and education in science and engineering fields.
Dr. Akbas intends to use the grant for research in the compression of graph neural networks (GNNs). A GNN is a type of artificial neural network that is useful for processing data that can be represented in graph form. Application domains for GNNs include transportation, biomedical sciences, social networks, and computer security. Dr. Akbas plans to evaluate the performance of her new compression models by applying them to drug-disease matching and event-detection problems.
Prior to joining Georgia State in 2022, Dr. Akbas was an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. She earned a B.S. degree from TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Turkey), an M.S. from Bilkent University (Turkey), and a Ph.D. from Florida State University. Her research areas include machine learning and data mining with a focus on relational data.
Dr. Akbas is the ninth faculty member from the Department of Computer Science to receive an NSF CAREER award. The previous winners are Dr. Ashwin Ashok (2022), Dr. Raheem Beyah (2009), Dr. Zhipeng Cai (2013), Dr. Xiaojun Cao (2006), Dr. Xiaolin Hu (2009), Dr. Yingshu Li (2006), Dr. Pavel Skums (2021), and Dr. WenZhan Song (2010). Dr. Beyah is now Dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. Dr. Skums is an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Song is the Georgia Power Mickey A. Brown Professor of Engineering and founding director of the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems at the University of Georgia.