Neeraja Yadwadkar of Texas ECE has been named a recipient of an Amazon Research Award for her work on "Easy-to-use and cost-efficient distributed inference serving."

Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. 

Neeraja Yadwadkar is an Assistant Professor and is a Fellow of AMD Chair in Computer Engineering in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

She is a Cloud Computing Systems researcher, with a strong background in Machine Learning (ML). Most of her research straddles the boundaries of Systems and ML. Advances in systems, ML, and hardware architectures are about to launch a new era in which we can use the entire cloud as a computer. New ML techniques are being developed for solving complex resource management problems in systems. Similarly, systems research is getting influenced by properties of emerging ML algorithms, and evolving hardware architectures. Bridging these complementary fields, her research focuses on using and developing ML techniques for systems, and building systems for ML.

She graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the RISE Lab at University of California, Berkeley, working with Randy Katz and Joseph Gonzalez. Before starting her PhD, she received her masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and her bachelors from the Government College of Engineering, Pune.