Tisch University Professor
Operations Research and Information Engineering

Biography

Christina Lee will be joining the faculty at Cornell in July 2018 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. She is currently a a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. She received her PhD in 2017 and MS in 2013 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She received her BS in Computer Science from California Institute of Technology in 2011. She is a recipient of the MIT Jacobs Presidential Fellowship, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Claude E. Shannon Research Assistantship.

Research Interests

Her research focuses on designing and analyzing scalable algorithms for processing social data based on principles from statistical inference. She has recently studied similarity based neighbor methods for matrix estimation and community detection, showing that they can provide consistent estimates for very sparse data regimes within a flexible class of latent variable models. Applications for these algorithms include recommendation systems, low-cost crowdsourcing, social networks, and online marketplaces. She has also worked on developing scalable local algorithms for sparse matrix computations.

• Data Science

Selected Publications

• Borgs, Christian, Jennifer Chayes, Christina Lee, Devavrat Shah.  2017. “Thy Friend is My Friend: Iterative Collaborative Filtering for Sparse Matrix Estimation.”  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
• Lee, Christina, Yihua Li, Devavrat Shah, Dogyoon Song.  2016. “Blind Regression: Nonparametric Regression for Latent Variable Models via Collaborative Filtering.”  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
• Lee, Christina, Yihua Li, Devavrat Shah.  2013. “Computing the Stationary Distribution Locally.”  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

Selected Awards and Honors

• Claude E. Shannon Research Assistantship (MIT EECS) 2016
• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (National Science Foundation) 2013
• MIT Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Presidential Fellowship (MIT) 2016