Guy Van den Broeck, assistant professor of computer science in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members at the start of their research and teaching careers.

Van den Broeck’s research interests are in machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, applications of probabilistic reasoning and learning, and artificial intelligence in general. This award includes a five-year, $400,000 research grant to support the synthesis of two distinct branches of AI — data-centric machine learning with symbolic reasoning, a more established area that relies on logic.

His honors include the 2019 Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The award is considered the highest award in the AI field for researchers under the age of 35. He gave a talk explaining his research at the conference. Van den Broeck, who is a Samueli fellow, joined the UCLA faculty in 2015. He leads the Statistical and Relational Artificial Intelligence Lab.