Nokia announces 2018 Bell Labs Prize winners; Samory Kpotufe wins top prize for fundamental breakthrough in machine learning

Press Release

• Kpotufe wins First Prize, $100,000 and opportunity to collaborate with Bell Labs developing a quantitative theoretical basis for transfer machine learning
• UCLA's Aydin Babakhani wins 2^nd Prize for pioneering devices that will revolutionize sensing with terahertz waves
• Team from Israel takes 3rd Prize for ground-breaking theoretical work on optimal wireless transmission for massive scale IoT

6 December 2018

Murray Hill, N.J. - Nokia today announced the top three winners of its fifth annual Bell Labs Prize, an international competition for innovators with ideas that will significantly 'change the game' in the field of information and communications technologies by a factor of 10. The winners collectively earned $175,000 in cash prizes and are given the unique opportunity to collaborate with Nokia Bell Labs researchers to help realize their vision.

This year's Bell Labs Prize winners are:

First Place: Samory Kpotufe, currently an Assistant Professor at Princeton, and joining Columbia University next month, won the First Prize and $100,000 for his pioneering work on the critically important field of 'transfer learning' in machine learning that answers the question of how and when can learning from one machine learning tool, be applied to another; this is a question that lies at the heart of all machine learning - is each model a 'one off' or can the learnings be applied to other scenarios, and if so when? Samory has answered this question with a breakthrough theory that provides a quantitative answer.

Second Place: Aydin Babakhani of UCLA won Second Prize and $50,000 for his work on novel terahertz devices that can produce and receive a broad spectrum of Terahertz radiation at low cost and tiny form factor, opening the door to the imaging of our world in profoundly new ways.

Third Place: A team comprised of Benjamin Zaidel of Bar-llan University and Shlomo Shamai of Technion Institute of Technology, won Third Prize and $25,000, for their pioneering work on a practically implementable optimal air interface solution for connecting millions of IoT devices over radio network resources that is extremely close to the theoretical performance limit and cost-optimized.

Marcus Weldon, President of Nokia Bell Labs and CTO of Nokia, said, "The Bell Labs prize is a unique opportunity for innovators to collaborate with Bell Labs researchers to invent the future and solve the critical problems confronting humanity. This year's collection of proposals elevated the competition to new levels, reflecting the ever-increasing role that technology has in improving nearly every facet of our lives. The top three projects were extremely close in the final judging, but Samory is a well-deserved winner of the 2018 Bell Labs Prize as his research in transfer learning takes the much-vaunted field of machine learning and puts it on a much firmer foundation for the future. The team here at Bell Labs looks forward to collaborating with all top three winners to help realize the full potential of their research ideas, in the coming years."