John Wright is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2009, and was with Microsoft Research from 2009-2011. His research is in the area of high-dimensional data analysis. In particular, his recent research has focused on developing algorithms for robustly recovering structured signal representations from incomplete and corrupted observations, and applying them to practical problems in imaging and vision. His work has received an number of awards and honors, including the 2009 Lemelson-Illinois Prize for Innovation for his work on face recognition, the 2009 UIUC Martin Award for Excellence in Graduate Research, a 2008-2010 Microsoft Research Fellowship, and the 2012 COLT Best Paper Award (with Wang and Spielman).

In regards to research, we are developing tools for robustly analyzing high-dimensional data, and applying them to problems in visual data analysis, such as image and video compression, face and object recognition. Our work places particular emphasis on finding methods that perform well even when the data are unreliable — noisy or corrupted, and which come with proofs of correctness.