Christopher Brinton, Elmore Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has selected another faculty member for a named professorship. Christopher Brinton is now the Elmore Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The position is made possible thanks to a generous donation from alumnus William B. Elmore, as part of his $25-million gift to name the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Brinton says it is an honor to be recognized with the Elmore Chaired Professorship.

“I feel fortunate to have found a research area and set of classes at Purdue that I am passionate to contribute to,” he says. “I am thankful to my graduate students, postdocs, undergraduate students, and collaborators who are working with me every day to formalize the intersection between communication network systems and machine learning services. I am also grateful for all of my fantastic colleagues and mentors both within and outside of Purdue ECE who have helped guide me in my career. Finally, I want to express my sincere thanks both to Purdue ECE’s Rising Stars Committee, and to Bill Elmore and his family, for their generous contributions that have made this possible.”

The honor is part of the Elmore Rising Star Professorships program. Rising Star Professorships are awarded to Assistant or Associate Professors who have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and leadership in research, teaching and engagement.

Michael D. Zoltowski, the Thomas J. and Wendy Engibous Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is pleased to see Brinton's work receive this honor.

“Chris is an extremely smart, innovative, and highly productive researcher of the highest caliber,” says Zoltowski. “He is also an innovative and tireless educator who has broken new ground on how to use machine learning concepts to greatly enhance our educational mission and DEI outreach.”

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). Brinton is working 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 the recipient of many awards, including 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.