Cesar A Uribe

SEC scholar May – July 2024

Cesar A. Uribe is a Louis Owen Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He received his M.Sc. degrees in systems and control from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013 and 2016, respectively. He also received a PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems-LIDS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-MIT until 2020. He is the recipient of the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, 100k Strong in the Americas Innovation Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award. He held a visiting professor position at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology until 2022. His research interests include distributed learning and optimization, decentralized control, algorithm analysis, and computational optimal transport.

Training ML systems require expensive computational power and data. While collaborative learning has proven effective in large-scale distributed settings, models, distributions, and data access heterogeneity create fundamental problems when deciding how to align, fuse, or transfer a model across agents, stalling decentralization in the wild. Cesar’s work develops the theory and applications of large-scale optimization and machine learning towards new paradigms for designing, analysing, and optimising scalable, cooperative, and data-driven autonomy.

The objective is to create synergies between the Digital Futures program and Cesar’s long-term research goal of establishing algorithmic foundations that guarantee decentralization, optimality, scalability, and robustness to realize the next-generation socio-technical systems (specifically infrastructure, environment, and health).

Contact: cau4@rice.edu