Professor Tianbao Yang is the Principle Investigator for a grant recently awarded by the NSF.

The project, entitled "CRII: III: Scaling up Distance Metric Learning for Large-scale Ultrahigh-dimensional Data," will focus on researching and developing highly scalable stochastic optimization algorithms for distance metric learning (DML) for large-scale ultrahigh-dimensional (LSUD) data. The research will enable data scientists to extract more knowledge from massive high-dimensional data complementing the White House BIG DATA Initiative to analyze large and complex data sets. Beyond its research impact, this project will facilitate the development of a new machine learning course at the University of Iowa (UI), and contribute to training future professionals in big data analytics. Broader impact will be further affected by dissemination of results through publications, open-sourced software, etc.

This two-year project has been awarded $174,576.

For further information see the project web site at http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~tyng/dml.html.