Caleb Belth awarded Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement

Caleb Belth, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering, has been awarded the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement by the College of Engineering. This award is presented to an outstanding graduate student in each degree program at the College; the criteria considered include the student’s active participation in research, leadership, and academic performance.

Caleb is interested in how learnability, computational efficiency, and information theoretic laws help children overcome sparse data to acquire language, and what that means for linguistic theory. He is advised by Prof. Danai Koutra.

He has also contributed research in graph mining, including methods for choosing unlinked pairs of nodes to investigate further with a link prediction method or experimental study; identifying subtle patterns in networks that are too infrequent to be discovered by frequency alone; and discovering errors and missing information in incomplete knowledge graphs. Applications include anomaly detection, suspicious behavior discovery, and city/urban planning, including current projects with the City of Detroit on transportation planning.

Caleb was selected for both a 2020-2023 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and and NDSEG Fellowship, and is currently funded by the NSF fellowship. His website is at https://quickshift.xyz/.