PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Tim Kraska, assistant professor of computer science at Brown University, is one of 126 researchers from the U.S. and Canada to receive a research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for 2017, the foundation announced last week. The fellowships are awarded annually to early career scientists and scholars identified as the next generation of scientific leaders.

Kraska’s lab focuses on interactive data science and transactional database systems for modern hardware, with the aim to build a full suite of analytics tools for interactive data science. His work includes exploring new touch-and-pen interfaces that enable people to explore data and build predictive models without needing to write code. Other projects help to prevent inexperienced users from making common mistakes in the model building process.

“Very few people possess a strong domain expertise and a deep understanding of machine learning, data management, visualization and many other related fields,” Kraska said. “My research aims to democratize data science by enabling a broader range of users to unfold the potential of their data through the development of a new generation of algorithms and systems for interactive and sustainable data-driven discovery.”

Kraska joins several other Sloan Fellows currently on the Brown computer science faculty including Amy Greenwald, Anna Lysyanskaya, Stefanie Tellex and Paul Valiant.