Congratulations to Efstathia Soufleri on earning her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Purdue Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering! Efstathia was honored with her hood by her advisor, Professor Kaushik Roy, during the Purdue graduation ceremony on Saturday, August 3, 2024.

Efstathia completed her undergraduate studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her doctoral research focused on developing privacy-preserving and efficient machine learning algorithms. With her PhD now in hand, Efstathia is set to embark on a tenure-track faculty position in Europe.

In her most recent project, Efstathia devised an innovative method to train and perform inference directly on compressed videos. By leveraging the curvature of networks processing these compressed video modalities as a proxy, she achieved significant computational advantages. Her approach, which includes early exits in neural networks, offers improved generalization results, especially in scenarios with low inference latency and limited computational resources.

During her time with the NRL, Efstathia valued the opportunity to foster new collaborations and engage in discussions with fellow NRL members. The weekly NRL presentations and meetings were instrumental in keeping her informed about others' work, which helped refine her own research.

Efstathia cherished the chance to meet and connect with many new people through NRL, noting that she "formed friendships that will endure beyond my graduation." Her advice to future PhD students is to "Enjoy the PhD journey and make the most of this experience."

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