Hu Ding awarded NSF CRII Grant

Hu Ding, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University has been awarded an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant for the project "Novel Geometric Algorithms for Certain Data Analysis Problems".

We can often see trends or clusters in data by graphing or plotting-- giving geometric form to data. As data increases in volume and complexity, giving it geometric form and then developing computational geometry algorithms is still a fruitful way to approach data analysis. For example, activity data from a smartphone or fitness tracker can be viewed as a point in thousands of dimensions whose coordinates include all positions, heart rates, etc. from an entire sequence of measurements. For better privacy, we can share summaries (rough position, duration, etc.) as points in tens of dimensions. Points from many people can be clustered to identify similar patterns, and patterns matched (with unreliable data identified and discarded) to recognize actions that a digital assistant could take to improve quality of life or health outcomes.

This project aims to develop a set of advanced data structures and novel geometric algorithms for several fundamental data analysis problems. The new geometric insights, advanced data structures, and efficient algorithmic techniques will enrich further development in computational geometry and bring fresh ideas to other areas, including machine learning, computer vision, data mining, and bioinformatics.

(Date Posted: 2017-02-13)