Hariri Institute Research Fellow Receives NSF CAREER Award

BY: GINA MANTICA

Francesco Orabona, Hariri Institute Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, recently received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF CAREER awards recognize exceptional early-career scientists that will use their funding to support the next generation of scientists and diversify the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Orabona’s Optimization and Machine Learning Lab designs and analyzes machine learning algorithms. The name “machine learning” is somewhat deceptive, since humans need to tweak current machine learning algorithms to make them work properly. With funding from his NSF CAREER award, Orabona is developing entirely automatic machine learning algorithms, for example by eliminating a parameter known as the “learning rate”.

“Imagine the learning rate is like the temperature that you need to set your oven to when you cook something,” said Orabona, “Now imagine that you put food in the oven and the oven automatically knows what temperature to cook it at, and how long to cook it for.” The ability for a machine learning algorithm to work without any human input, like an oven being able to set its own temperature without a person pressing buttons, is Orabona’s ultimate goal.

Orabona will also use his NSF CAREER funding to teach machine learning theory to people of diverse backgrounds. He is collaborating with both Smith College to give undergraduate women hands-on experiences in machine learning and the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists (PROMYS) to teach high school teachers machine learning theory. “It’s important to try to bring machine learning theory to more people,” said Orabona.