The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, has named Nitesh Chawla, Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, a fellow.

Chawla, an expert in machine learning, data science and network science, is the founding Director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society at Notre Dame.

The ACM Fellows program honors the top one percent of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service.  

This year’s 57 fellows were cited for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in such areas as cryptography, graphics, machine learning, software and robotics. Fellows are nominated by their peers, who are prior ACM Fellows.

Chawla was recognized for his contributions to machine learning research for imbalanced data, graphs and interdisciplinary innovations. Recent years have seen a significant growth in the types and scale of graphs/networks as a mechanism of representing complex networks. Chawla’s research has advanced machine learning algorithms to tackle both the diversity and scale of such graphs.

In addition to his multiple awards for research, which include his elevation to IEEE fellow in 2022, Chawla has received several other awards, including the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Early Career Award, IBM Watson Faculty Award, and the National Academy of Engineering New Faculty Fellowship. He is also a twice-recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Chawla is an inventor and entrepreneur, co-founding a data science software and solutions company, Aunalytics Inc., as well as Intrepid Phoenix, which uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized pathways for recovery from substance use.

Chawla joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2007. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of South Florida and B.E. from the University of Pune, India.