PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Benjamin Recht

Also known as Ben Recht

Benjamin Recht is a professor in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, where his group studies how to make machine learning systems more robust. He completed an MIT doctorate in 2006 and received a Presidential Early Career Award in 2012 while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With Feng Niu, Christopher Ré and Stephen Wright, he co-wrote Hogwild!, a lock-free approach to parallelizing stochastic gradient descent that received a NeurIPS Test of Time Award in 2020. His ICLR 2017 paper, Understanding Deep Learning Requires Rethinking Generalization, won a Best Paper Award, and in 2022 he and Moritz Hardt published Patterns, Predictions, and Actions. Princeton University Press published his book The Irrational Decision in 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2006

    An MIT doctorate, then Caltech

    He earns a mathematics degree at the University of Chicago and completes a doctorate at MIT in 2006. He then becomes a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech's Center for the Mathematics of Information.

  2. 2012

    Prizes at Wisconsin

    He receives a Presidential Early Career Award in 2012 while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Emmanuel Candès also win the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization for Exact Matrix Completion via Convex Optimization.

  3. March 2014

    An assistant professor at Berkeley

    In March 2014, the Department of Statistics at Berkeley features him as an assistant professor.

  4. 2017

    An ICLR 2017 Best Paper Award

    He co-writes Understanding Deep Learning Requires Rethinking Generalization with Chiyuan Zhang, Samy Bengio, Moritz Hardt and Oriol Vinyals. The paper wins a Best Paper award at ICLR 2017.

  5. 2017–2020

    Two NeurIPS Test of Time Awards

    He receives a NeurIPS Test of Time Award in 2017. In 2020 he shares a second one for Hogwild!, a lock-free approach to parallelizing stochastic gradient descent that he co-writes with Feng Niu, Christopher Ré and Stephen Wright.

  6. 2022

    A machine-learning book with Hardt

    He and Moritz Hardt publish Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: A Story about Machine Learning with Princeton University Press in 2022.

  7. 2026

    Writing The Irrational Decision

    He publishes The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us with Princeton University Press in 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at Berkeley

    He is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. His group studies how to make machine learning systems more robust to interactions with a dynamic and uncertain world.

Sources and credits

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  1. Benjamin Recht - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Ben Recht people.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Benjamin Recht | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation nsf.gov. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Computer science professor lands prestigious award for optimization paper ls.wisc.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Ben Recht tackles Big Data | Department of Statistics statistics.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. ICLR 2017: Retrospective - Criteo AI Lab ailab.criteo.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. [1611.03530] Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. NeurIPS 2020 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Books people.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. Benjamin Recht | Research UC Berkeley vcresearch.berkeley.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.