Education Policy, Business and Technology

U Michigan Researchers Win $1.6 Million to Contribute to DARPA Machine-Learning Technique Repository

Campus Technology: The University of Michigan has won a $1.6-million grant to develop tools that will help people who are not data scientists better use the data they have access to.

Led by Jason Corso, professor of engineering and computer science, and dubbed SPIDER, for Subspace Primitives that are Interpretable and DivERse, the Michigan project aims to develop new techniques to find meaning in different kinds of datasets by focusing on features within a dataset that are much less variable than the overall set's capacity for variation.

"For instance," according to a U-M news release, "a 128-by-128 image of a face contains 16,384 pixels, but the pixels don't vary independently from one another. In fact, the expected variations can be described by about 10 or 20 dimensions, said Corso — down from 16,384 assuming that each pixel is independent of the others. By looking at 'subspaces' like this, he and [Laura] Balzano simplify the problem of interpreting images and other arrays of data."

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