Jin Won Kim, a former PhD student advised by Prof. Prashant Mehta, was honored for his doctoral thesis "Duality for Nonlinear Filtering."
Written by Julia Park
Recent MechSE graduate student Jin Won Kim has won the 2023 CSL PhD Thesis Award. This annual award recognizes a PhD thesis written by a student at the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at Illinois. This year’s award marks the eighth annual honor.
“Students put in very long hours in their research laboratories and get really amazing results. It became clear that we needed to honor our graduate students’ many contributions that contribute to the success of CSL. In particular, the CSL PhD Thesis Award recognizes contributions that leverage excellence in disciplinary research but through interdisciplinary solutions that address major societal problems. This year’s winner certainly accomplished this goal,” said Klara Nahrstedt, CSL Director and a professor of computer science.
Kim’s doctoral thesis, “Duality for Nonlinear Filtering,” was advised by MechSE Professor Prashant Mehta and deals with the stochastic filtering problem for a hidden Markov model with the white noise observation model. Kim is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Potsdam in Germany.
“CSL allows the time – in this case, 10 years – of intellectual space and more significantly, the ecosystem for this kind of work to happen,” said Mehta.