Assistant Professor Sriraam Natarajan has been selected to participate in the Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP). The objectives YIP are to attract outstanding young university faculty members to Army research, and to support and encourage their teaching and research careers. The ARO solicits proposals for basic and scientific research in mechanical sciences, environmental sciences, mathematical and computer sciences, electronics, computational and information sciences, physics, chemistry, life sciences, and materials science. Natarajan will receive $150,000 for three years to support his research on the applicability and steerability of machine learning.
"The goal is to attack the conceptual and the algorithmic challenges necessary to build a powerful system that is able to better cope with noise and uncertainty by interacting with human experts," said Natarajan of his research.
Natarajan’s research aims to increase the number of people who can make effective use of machine learning by extending the process by which domain experts can directly communicate with powerful learning algorithms. His research allows users to guide learning algorithms by providing knowledge about a specific task. Also, his research seeks to extend the power of learning algorithms by allowing them to request guidance from the human expert as necessary thus allowing a natural machine-human interaction.