Christopher Brinton, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Christopher Brinton, associate professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University is being honored with the 2022 Intel® Rising Star Faculty Award (RSA). The program selects early-career academic researchers who lead groundbreaking technology research demonstrating the potential to disrupt the tech industry. The 15 award winners chosen for 2022 represent the fields of electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, material science, and chemical engineering.

The RSA program recognizes individuals who are doing exceptional work in their field and hopes to facilitate long-term collaborative relationships with senior technical leaders at Intel. Award recipients are also chosen for their innovative teaching methods and for increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science and engineering.

Brinton’s research is at the intersection of distributed computing, wireless communications, network optimization, and machine learning. His work devises techniques for intelligence management in contemporary networked systems (i.e., networks for learning) and data-driven methodologies to optimize/defend how distributed systems operate (i.e., learning for networks). Over the next several years, Brinton is planning to formalize “fog learning,” a new paradigm for training and managing machine learning models over contemporary fog network architectures. Unlike existing centralized and federated learning architectures, fog learning advocates intelligent orchestration of computing resources across network elements spanning the “cloud-to-things continuum” from datacenter servers to edge devices. The improvements in model quality, resource efficiency, and network security provided by fog learning will help enable widespread deployment of our world’s increasingly complex deep learning models across mobile devices, thus revolutionizing edge intelligence and mobile user quality of experience. Brinton is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the Office of Naval Research’s YIP Award, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s YFA Award.