Dr. Joydeep Ghosh, an electrical and computer engineering professor, received two grants totaling more than $1 million from the National Science Foundation to apply his data mining research techniques in two distinct areas.
For the first project, Ghosh and co-principal investigators, Drs. Melba Crawford and Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University, received $851,000 to predict long-term changes in land use over large geographical areas. He will use his previously developed system for classifying land covers that extracts, analyzes and manages large sets of remotely sensed data, and determine how to apply the system for predicting change.
For the second project, Ghosh and co-principal investigator Dr. Inderjit S. Dhillon, an associate professor in computer sciences also at The University of Texas at Austin, received $430,000 to identify natural groupings and similarities among objects in data sets. For example, they will compare genes with unknown functions to genes with known functions, based on how they respond to different stress conditions, to discover the purpose of the currently unknown functions. On a larger scale, researchers will help determine compatible sets of people based on their interaction with other people through large social networking sites. Overall, this research can improve understanding of underlying physical, economic or social phenomena.
