Dr. Rene Vidal receives NSF Big Data Award

Dr. Rene Vidal, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Imaging Science, has received funding for a new research project from the Critical Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering (BIGDATA) Program of the National Science Foundation, which supports “developing or studying fundamental techniques, theories, methodologies, and technologies of broad applicability to Big Data problems.”

The grant, entitled “Learning a Union of Subspaces from Big and Corrupted Data,” provides $600K for three years to support the development of theory and algorithms for automatically discovering multiple low-dimensional structures in high-dimensional data, and evaluates these algorithms in image clustering applications. The developed techniques will enhance our ability to handle big data problems from multiple sources and modalities, and advance the knowledge on how to interpret massive amounts of complex high-dimensional data. This research will be done in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Robinson, from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics of Johns Hopkins University.