Samsung AI Center Cambridge Director Dr. Nicholas Lane has been awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award for 2020. The international award was founded in 2013, and recognizes an individual who has produced outstanding research or product contributions in the area of mobile computing early in their career.

The ACM is the high-profile academic organization that presents the prestigious Turing Award, and SIGMOBILE is ACM’s international special interest group on the topics of mobile computing, wireless networks and wearable computing. SIGMOBILE’s Rockstar Award is awarded to an individual who makes outstanding contributions to the field of mobile computing within 10 years of receiving their highest university degree or at an age younger than 40. Entrants are nominated by their peers, before an award committee that includes past award winners screens nominees and selects that year’s recipient. 2020 marks the first time that a professor from a university outside of the United States has won SIGMOBILE’s Rockstar Award.

Dr. Nicholas Lane is a Director at the Samsung AI Center in Cambridge where he oversees teams that work on on-device and distributed machine learning. In recent years he has focused primarily on developing deep learning for modeling human activity and context, as well as enabling state-of-the-art signal processing and modeling algorithms to work efficiently on embedded and mobile-class hardware. Commenting on why Dr. Lane was chosen to receive the honor, the committee said the award recognized “his contributions to the understanding of how resource-constrained mobile devices can robustly understand, reason and react to complex user behaviors and environments through new paradigms in learning algorithms and system design.”

Speaking about receiving SIGMOBILE’s 2020 Rockstar Award, Dr. Lane said, “I am delighted and honored to have received this award. I feel very fortunate to have worked with many wonderfully talented researchers over the years, and this award is a reflection of these collaborative efforts. I believe it is also a signal of the growing importance of on-device machine learning, and I look forward to doing my part to keep Samsung at the forefront of this rapidly evolving technology.”