Aditya Grover, an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received the Computers and Thought Award, which recognizes early career researchers for notable contributions to artificial intelligence.
Grover is recognized for “his foundational contributions uniting deep generative models, representation learning, and reinforcement learning, and for their applications in advancing scientific reasoning.”
The annual award is presented by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. As this year’s recipient, Grover will present his research at the group’s August meeting in Montreal, Canada.
Grover heads the Machine Intelligence group at UCLA, which develops AI systems that interact and reason with limited supervision. His research focuses on the intersection of generative models and sequential decision making.
He is the co-founder of Inception, a generative AI-innovation company, where he is developing a new generation of parallelizable large language models and solutions optimized for quality, speed and cost. Grover also investigates sustainability in computer science as part of the ML4Climate initiative.
In 2024, Grover received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award with a five-year, $500,000 grant to support his research on developing generative AI models. He was also named a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow. The fellowship provides a two-year grant of up to $300,000 for interdisciplinary AI research aimed at aligning AI systems with human values by 2050.
Grover was recognized in Forbes’ 2024 30 Under 30 list in science and named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. Since joining the UCLA Samueli faculty in 2021, he has also received an Amazon Research Award, an AI Researcher of the Year Award from Samsung, a Google Award for Inclusion Research and a Meta Research Award.
In 2019, UCLA Samueli computer science professor Guy Van den Broeck received the same Computers and Thought Award.
