Carnegie Mellon University
January 31, 2013

News Brief: Kyrölä Wins VMWare Graduate Fellowship

KyrolaAapo Kyrölä, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department, has been awarded a 2013 Graduate Fellowship from the VMWare Academic Program to support his work on large-scale machine learning and graph computation.

He is one of three recipients this year of the fellowship, which begins in September and includes a stipend of $35,000, plus full tuition and fees. The fellowship supports outstanding students who are pursuing research related to VMWare's business interests, such as core machine virtualization and work related to cloud computing. 

Kyrölä's main research project is GraphChi, a disk-based system for computing efficiently on graphs with billions of edges, such as social networks or web graphs. By using a novel Parallel Sliding Windows algorithm, GraphChi is able to execute many advanced data mining, machine learning and recommendation algorithms using just a single consumer-level computer. GraphChi is part of the GraphLab project. Guy Blelloch, professor of computer science, and Carlos Guestrin, now at the University of Washington, are his advisers.

Pictured above is Aapo Kyrölä.