Chellappa Part of New Machine Learning Consortium

Machine learning researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) are part of Northrop Grumman Corporation’s newly launched research consortium known as Research in Applications for Learning Machines (REALM). The consortium has given $1.2 million in research funding to three multi-university team partners.

REALM is a unique industry-academia partnership advancing research, fostering collaboration, and addressing technological challenges in machine learning, cognition and artificial intelligence.

The UMD-led team is exploring concepts such as learning from few labels, domain adaptation of object detection, tracking and recognition algorithms across multi-sensors, and building 3D models from aerial and ground-based images using generative adversarial networks.

The project is led by Distinguished University Professor and Minta Martin Professor of Engineering Rama Chellappa. He is joined by professors Rene Vidal and Vishal Patel from the Johns Hopkins University, and Aswin Sankaranarayanan, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University. The collaborators will work on basic and applied research with other university researchers to address key customer applications, including multiple sensor track classification, identification and correlation; situational knowledge on demand; and quantitative dynamic adaptive planning.

Chellappa, who has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) says, “over the last decade, machine learning and AI have become the dominant technologies in many sectors. By giving this grant to the UMD-lead team, Northrop Grumman is enabling the incorporation of machine learning and AI technologies for understanding multi-sensor and multi-modal data.”

The universities participating in the other two REALM projects are Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University; Stanford University; the University of Illinois at Chicago; and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Go here to read the full news release.

—Story by Kara Stamets