Bin Yu is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, and Center for Computational Biology, and Senior Advisor at The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California at Berkeley. Her current research interests focus on AI risk and evaluation, veridical data science, explainable and trustworthy AI, statistical machine learning algorithms and theory (e.g. deep learning and decision trees),
interdisciplinary data problems from precision medicine, genomics, and neuroscience. She pioneered the veridical data science framework for reproducible scientific conclusions and has developed effective interpretable ML/DL methods for understanding compositionality, including iterative Random Forests (iRF), stability-driven NMF, Adaptive Wavelet Distillation (AWD), Contextual Decomposition for Transformers (CD-T), and SPEX/ProxySPEX.
She obtained her B.S. degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 1984, her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and 1990, respectively. She held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale University and was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent. She was Chair of the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley from 2009 to 2012. She was a 50% consultant researcher in the deep learning group at MSR-Redmond in 2022-2023.
She is Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006, an Invited Speaker at ICIAM in 2011 and ICM in 2022, and the Tukey Memorial Lecturer of the Bernoulli Society in 2012. She was President of IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) in 2013-2014, Rietz Lecturer of IMS in 2016, Breiman Lecturer of NeurIPS in 2019, Wald Lecturer of IMS in 2023, COPSS DAAL (formerly Fisher Lecture and award) in 2023, Le Cam Lecturer of the French Statistical Society in 2026. She was Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and Weil Neurohub Investigator. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Lausanne in 2021. She is a Fellow of IMS, ASA, AAAS and IEEE.
She served on the Board of Mathematics Sciences and Applications (BMSA) of NAS, the Board of Trustees at ICERM, and the Scientific Advisory Board of IPAM, and as as co-Chair of the advisory committee of SAMSI, and Scientific Advisory Board of The Alan Turing Institute in UK. She is serving on the Editorial Board of PNAS and as a co-editor of Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR).
