Lawrence Carin

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Lawrence Carin earned the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. In 1989 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now part of NYU) as an Assistant Professor, and became an Associate Professor there in 1994. In September 1995 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Duke University, where he is now a Professor. He was ECE Department Chair from 2011-2014, and Vice Provost and Vice President for Research from 2014-2020. He was the Provost at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) from 2020-2023, returning to Duke in 2023. From 2003-2014 he held the William H. Younger Distinguished Professorship, and since 2018 he has held the James L. Meriam Distinguished Professorship. Dr. Carin's research focuses on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). He publishes widely in the main ML/AI forums, and has addressed many applications of AI, including in  medicine and security. He was co-founder of the small business Signal Innovations Group, which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2014, and in 2017 he co-founded the company Infinia ML, which was acquired by Aspirion in 2023. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Appointments and Affiliations

  • Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Professor of Computer Science

Contact Information

Education

  • B.S.E. University of Maryland, College Park, 1985
  • M.Sc.Eng. University of Maryland, College Park, 1986
  • Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park, 1989

Research Interests

Applied statistics and machine learning

Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

  • Fellows. Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 2001

Courses Taught

  • IDS 793: Independent Study
  • ECE 899: Special Readings in Electrical Engineering
  • ECE 891: Internship
  • ECE 590: Advanced Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • ECE 495: Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • ECE 493: Projects in Electrical and Computer Engineering

In the News

Representative Publications

  • Si, Shijing, Xiaoming Jiang, Qinliang Su, and Lawrence Carin. “Detecting implicit biases of large language models with Bayesian hypothesis testing.” Scientific Reports 15, no. 1 (April 2025): 12415. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-95825-x.
  • Zhang, Hao, Yulai Cong, Zhengjue Wang, Lei Zhang, Miaoyun Zhao, Liqun Chen, Shijing Si, Ricardo Henao, and Lawrence Carin. “Text Feature Adversarial Learning for Text Generation With Knowledge Transfer From GPT2.” IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst 35, no. 5 (May 2024): 6558–69. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3210975.
  • Assaad, Serge, David Dov, Christine Park, Richard Davis, Shahar Z. Kovalsky, Walter T. Lee, Russel R. Kahmke, et al. “A Preliminary Study Comparing the Performance of Thyroid Molecular Tests to a Deep Learning Algorithm in Predicting Malignancy in Indeterminate Thyroid Fine Needle Aspiration Biopsies.” Thyroid 34, no. 4 (April 2024): 531–35. https://doi.org/10.1089/thy.2023.0054.
  • Verma, V., N. Mehta, K. J. Liang, A. Mishra, and L. Carin. “Meta-Learned Attribute Self-Interaction Network for Continual and Generalized Zero-Shot Learning.” In Proceedings - 2024 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2024, 2709–19, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1109/WACV57701.2024.00270.
  • Glass, Matthew, Zhicheng Ji, Richard Davis, Elizabeth N. Pavlisko, Louis DiBernardo, John Carney, Gregory Fishbein, et al. “A machine learning algorithm improves the diagnostic accuracy of the histologic component of antibody mediated rejection (AMR-H) in cardiac transplant endomyocardial biopsies.” Cardiovasc Pathol 72 (2024): 107646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carpath.2024.107646.