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Luis Sanchez Giraldo Awarded Department of Defense DEPSCoR Grant

June 01, 2021

Nathan Jacobs, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, will serve as co-investigator and senior mentor.

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Luis Sanchez Giraldo

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Luis Sanchez Giraldo

Luis Sanchez Giraldo, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been awarded funding by the Department of Defense for a new project through its Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) awards competition. Nathan Jacobs, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, will serve as co-investigator and senior mentor.

The project, “Measures of Information via Representation Learning,” is one of 17 projects to receive funding. The total amount distributed through the DEPSCoR awards is $10.2 million, with the UK team receiving $598,021 over three years.

Sanchez Giraldo describes the project as follows: “In machine learning, the use of conventional information theoretic quantities has been limited by a lack of robust and scalable estimators. Our view is that the fundamental problem is not the estimators, but the quantities we are trying to estimate. Here, we propose novel information theoretic quantities, with similar properties as the traditional quantities, that break through this barrier. This work will develop the theoretical foundations of alternative definitions of entropy and mutual information to address a fundamental problem in Machine Learning: building objective functions that can handle and integrate data from multiple sources with minimal supervision.”

Sanchez Giraldo joined the Department of Electrical Engineering faculty in 2019.

This material is based upon work supported by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under award number FA9550-21-1-0227. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Defense.