UC Merced Connect: Google award will help professor’s research in machine learning

Every day, your brain completes millions of complicated functions without you even being aware of them, and it learns as it goes.

Teaching a machine to do the same thing is extremely complicated, but it has gotten easier thanks to the work of UC Merced professor Miguel Carreira-Perpiñan.

Carreira-Perpiñan recently won a prestigious, competitive Google Faculty Research Award and a grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue an algorithm he’s designed to help machines conduct highly complicated processes faster, easier and more efficiently, more the way the human brain does.

“Professor Carreira-Perpiñán’s work is crucial given the increasing amount of data available to any person, any time, for example, via the Internet,” interim School of Engineering Dean Erik Rolland said. “If we want to be able to find any useful information in such mountains of data, we need smart, new methodologies to help us. This is the crux of his work.”

Advances in computation abilities through less expensive, more efficient processors, plus the generation of big data, has more people trying to figure out how to conduct sophisticated, large-scale analyses that can have applications in science, engineering and social sciences.

But there are limits on how small and powerful processors can be before the work they do has to be shared out among parallel processors, or in cloud computing. That makes optimizing complicated sequences of nested mathematical functions – layers of functions within functions – even more challenging.

Carreira-Perpiñán has devised an algorithm that intersects applied math, statistics and computer science.

It considers each of a mathematical function’s layers on its own, but also coordinates all the functions so they work together to get the desired outcome, whether it’s recognizing objects, recognizing speech and faces, helping self-driving cars, predicting the properties of materials or forecasting the stock market.

For example, the algorithm makes it possible for a computer to look at a picture you’ve taken of Yosemite National Park and, by computing progressively more abstract features such as edges, corners or object parts layer by layer, categorize the objects in the image such as mountains, trees or people – information your brain would come up with before you’ve even had time to snap that picture.

“Each of the steps in itself is relatively simple. It’s getting a machine to optimize many different steps at once that’s the challenge, because the resulting system is nonlinear, nonconvex and often nondifferentiable,” Carreira-Perpiñán said. “An algorithm that coordinates them all, and parallelizes them efficiently, while guaranteeing it can find a local optimum – that’s new.”

This is the second Google award given to a UC Merced faculty member, and Carreira-Perpiñán’s work is directly related to the many complex functions being performed at the company every day.

The $60,000 from Google, one of 105 awards given to applicants from all over the world, and the $450,000 from NSF will help Carreira-Perpiñán and his four current and past doctoral students continue with their work on the algorithm.

The work is directly related to artificial intelligence, which has seen interest surge again as developments like this offer significant advancements.

“It’s something people have been grappling with for some time,” Carreira-Perpiñán said. “We don’t know how the brain works, but this enables us to solve some of the same functions it does.”

Day of giving nets $40,000

On Dec. 2, UC Merced alumni, parents, staff, faculty members and friends of the campus came together for the first #GivingTuesdayUCMerced, in an effort to create a positive effect on the lives of students.

In all, nearly 170 people donated more than $11,000 in just 24 hours. Thanks to a three-to-one match provided by Wells Fargo and the Foster Farms poultry operation, more than $40,000 will benefit student scholarships.

This story was originally published December 23, 2014 at 4:20 PM with the headline "UC Merced Connect: Google award will help professor’s research in machine learning."