National Science Foundation Funds Florida Tech Undergraduate Research Proposal

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Ten select students from universities nationwide will participate in a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) experience at Florida Tech and the University of Central Florida (UCF) this summer. The program, in machine learning, is funded by NSF REU grants totaling $299,451 to the universities. The principal investigator is Georgios Anagnostopoulos, assistant professor in Florida Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The students, half at Florida Tech and half at UCF, will conduct research in machine learning from May 15 to July 21. They will display their work in a symposium at the end of the program and are expected to present their results at interdisciplinary conferences and, potentially, will publish the results in technical journals.
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.
At Florida Tech, faculty member Veton Kepuska, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will also be involved. Leading the UCF effort will be Michael Georgiopoulos, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Alison Morrison-Shetlar, interim dean of undergraduate studies.
Less than 10 percent of the annual applications for the prestigious NSF REU programs are funded. During 2007, Anagnostopoulos’ program is one of two active NSF REU site programs at Florida Tech. The other is in the Department of Physics and Space Sciences.
Anagnostopoulos earned his master’s and doctoral degrees 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.
PHOTO: Georgios Anagnostopoulos, assistant professor in Florida Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.