National Science Foundation Funds Florida Tech Machine Learning Grant

MELBOURNE, FLA. — Georgios Anagnostopoulos, Florida Tech assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has earned a grant of more than $237,000
from the National Science for a collaborative project in machine learning. A grant for a similar amount was awarded to the University of Central Florida,
which is a major partner in this effort.

Machine learning is traditionally considered a broad sub-field of artificial intelligence. The discipline draws concepts from a variety of other fields,
including cognitive sciences, information theory, statistics, mathematics, physics, philosophy and biology. Its cutting-edge applications include automatic
target recognition, earthquake prediction, gene expression discovery and intelligent credit fraud protection.

The project builds upon a prior prototype effort of the two universities. Project leaders intend to build a large, community of scholars, researchers and
learners by integrating research and education in machine learning. Additionally, the project will be supported by seven affiliated institutions across the
United States.

Anagnostopoulos earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Central Florida. In industry, he has worked as a
software engineer for Lucent Technologies/Agere Systems and Technisource, both in Orlando, Fla.

His primary research interests are statistical machine learning models and techniques as they apply to pattern recognition problems, such as bioinformatics
and data mining.