Congratulations to the leader of the CITRIS Big Data Initiative and UC Berkeley Professor Stuart Russell for being selected for a 2012 Blaise Pascal Research Chair in Computer Science.
The Blaise Pascal Research Chairs were established in 1996 by the State and the Ile-de-France region. Each chair allows highly qualified, internationally acclaimed, foreign research scientists in all disciplines, accompanied if they wish by other research workers, to continue their work on a scientific project for a 12 month period that could be spread over two years in a higher learning institution or research institution in Paris/Ile-de-France.
Since its inception a number of famous scientists were the Blaise Pascal Chair laureates: Gérard Debreu (UC Berkeley, 1983 Nobel Prize in Economics), Ahmed Zewail (Caltech, 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Igor Mel’čuk (University of Montreal, the world leading researcher in linguistics), George Smoot (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2006 Nobel Prize in experimental Astrophysics), Robert Langlands (UBC, 1996 Wolf Prize, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century), outstanding theoretical physicists Gabriele Veneziano (CERN/College de France), Alexander Zamolodchikov (Rutgers), and others.
Robin Milner was the last winner in the field of Computer Science in 2006.