Jelani Nelson

Jelani Osei Nelson (Amharic: ጄላኒ ኔልሰን; born June 28, 1984) is an Ethiopian-American Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Nelson is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.

Jelani Osei Nelson
BornJune 28, 1984 (1984-06-28) (age 39)
Los Angeles, California
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, MEng, PhD)
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisSketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors
Doctoral advisorErik Demaine and Piotr Indyk
Websitepeople.eecs.berkeley.edu/~minilek/

Early life and education

Nelson was born to an Ethiopian mother and an African-American father in Los Angeles, then grew up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.[1][2] He studied mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and remained there to complete his doctoral studies in computer science.[3] His Master's dissertation, External-Memory Search Trees with Fast Insertions, was supervised by Bradley C. Kuszmaul and Charles E. Leiserson.[4] He was a member of the theory of computation group, working on efficient algorithms for massive datasets. His doctoral dissertation, Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors (2011[5]), was supervised by Erik Demaine and Piotr Indyk.[6]

After his doctorate, Nelson worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, then Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.[3] He specialises in sketching and streaming algorithms.[3][7]

Career

Nelson is interested in big data and the development of efficient algorithms.[8] He joined the computer science faculty at Harvard University in 2013 and remained there until 2019 before joining UC Berkeley.[9] He is known for his contributions to streaming algorithms and dimensionality reduction, including proving that the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma is optimal (with Kasper Green Larsen),[10] developing the Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform (with Daniel Kane),[11] and an asymptotically optimal algorithm for the count-distinct problem (with Daniel Kane and David P. Woodruff).[12] He holds two patents related to applications of streaming algorithms to network traffic monitoring applications.[13][14] Nelson was the recipient of an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2015 and a Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016.[15] He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2017.[16]

Advocacy for rigorous math education

Nelson opposes the proposed California Mathematics Framework, expressing concern that the modified curriculum will harm vulnerable students by denying them rigorous mathematical instruction. In an interview with The New Yorker, he stated: “I’m extremely worried that the C.M.F. is implicitly advocating for certain groups of people to be pushed away from rigorous math courses into essentially a lower track, setting back progress in improving diversity in STEM.”[17] Nelson was involved in an online conflict with Stanford University professor Jo Boaler over efforts to revise California's framework for math instruction in April 2022.[18][19][20]

AddisCoder and JamCoders

Nelson founded AddisCoder, a summer program teaching computer science and algorithms to high schoolers in Ethiopia, in 2011 while finishing his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,.[21] The program has trained over 500 alumni, some of whom have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, KAIST, and Seoul National University, and to pursue PhDs in science and mathematics.[21] Starting in 2022, Nelson also co-organized JamCoders, a summer algorithms and coding camp in Jamaica modeled on AddisCoder.[22]

David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute

Nelson co-founded the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute, which aims to increase the number of African-American students receiving PhDs in mathematics.[17]

Awards and honours

References
  1. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: S6 Ep.4 - The Ethiopian-American Harvard Computer Science Professor Dr. Jelani Nelson [Part 1]. YouTube.
  2. Carlson, Suzanne (2017-01-16), Obama honors St. Thomas native, retrieved 2018-11-14
  3. "Harvard Portrait: Jelani Nelson". Harvard Magazine. 2015-04-15. Archived from the original on 2017-09-29. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
  4. External-memory search trees with fast insertions (Thesis). Charles E. Leiserson and Bradley C. Kuszmaul., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2006. hdl:1721.1/37084. Archived from the original on 2015-09-21. Retrieved 2018-10-27.{{cite thesis}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  5. Nelson, Jelani. "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Jelani Nelson. Retrieved 4 December 2022.
  6. Sketching and streaming high-dimensional vectors (Thesis). Erik D. Demaine and Piotr Indyk., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2011. hdl:1721.1/66314. Archived from the original on 2015-09-19. Retrieved 2018-10-27.{{cite thesis}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  7. Institute for Advanced Study (2016-08-18), Sketching and Streaming Algorithms - Jelani Nelson, retrieved 2018-10-27
  8. Harvard CMSA (2015-08-21), Professor Jelani Nelson (Harvard University), retrieved 2018-10-27
  9. "Professor Jelani Nelson's Departure To Leave 'Big Hole' in Computer Science Department". Harvard Crimson. 2019-04-03. Retrieved 2019-04-04.
  10. Kasper Green Larsen; Jelani Nelson (2017). Optimality of the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma. Proceedings of the 58th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS). pp. 633–638. arXiv:1609.02094. doi:10.1109/FOCS.2017.64.
  11. Daniel M. Kane; Jelani Nelson (2014). "Sparser Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transforms". Journal of the ACM. 61 (1): 1. arXiv:1012.1577. doi:10.1145/2559902. MR 3167920. S2CID 7821848.
  12. Daniel M. Kane; Jelani Nelson; David P. Woodruff (2010). "An Optimal Algorithm for the Distinct Elements Problem". Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS).
  13. Summarizing internet traffic patterns, retrieved 2018-10-27
  14. Aggregate contribution of iceberg queries, retrieved 2018-10-27
  15. "Harvard University - ONR Young Investigator Program 2018". harvard.communityforce.com. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
  16. "Jelani Nelson named Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow". www.seas.harvard.edu. 2017-02-23. Archived from the original on 2017-04-17. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
  17. "California Students Are Struggling in Math. Will Reforms Make the Problem Worse?". The New Yorker. 2022-09-08. Retrieved 2023-04-16.
  18. Ting, Eric (7 April 2022), "Stanford professor branded 'Professor Karen' over email to Black UC Berkeley professor speaks out", San Francisco Chronicle, retrieved 2022-04-08
  19. Tucker, Jill (5 April 2022). "California math wars get ugly: Accusations of racism and harassment ignite battle between Stanford and Cal profs". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 6 April 2022.
  20. Stanford Review (5 April 2022). "Professor Karen? Woke Stanford education prof calls the cops on Berkeley prof who exposed her $5000/hour consulting fee!". The Stanford Review. Retrieved 6 April 2022.
  21. "Alumni | AddisCoder". www.addiscoder.com. Archived from the original on 2019-05-27. Retrieved 2019-06-08.
  22. "Chronixx funds coding summer camp at UWI". jamaica-star.com. 2022-05-10. Retrieved 2023-04-16.
  23. "Jelani Nelson citation for ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics". awards.acm.org. 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-05-17.
  24. "Jelani Nelson wins Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers". www.seas.harvard.edu. 2017-01-11. Archived from the original on 2017-07-03. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
  25. "President Obama Honors Federally-Funded Early-Career Scientists". whitehouse.gov. 2017-01-09. Archived from the original on 2018-08-01. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
  26. "Jelani Nelson named Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow". www.seas.harvard.edu. 2017-02-23. Retrieved 2018-11-14.
  27. "CSAIL Students Honored For Outstanding Doctoral Theses | MIT CSAIL". www.csail.mit.edu. Archived from the original on 2018-10-06. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
  28. "Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Awards - IBM". researcher.watson.ibm.com. 2016-07-25. Archived from the original on 2017-07-16. Retrieved 2018-10-27.
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