University of Michigan Industrial and Operations Engineering (U-M IOE) Assistant Professor, Dr. Salar Fattahi has been awarded $430,556 from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for scientific research regarding low-rank matrix factorization.
“This award wouldn’t have been possible without the help from my students and colleagues within and outside the University of Michigan,” Fattahi said. “This award will help my research group and I investigate different aspects of low-rank matrix factorization, from optimization analysis to practical algorithm design.”
Low-rank matrix factorization is common in various contemporary machine learning applications, from Amazon and Netflix to motion detection in video. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a theoretical framework for studying the optimization landscape of optimization problems in machine learning.
If successful, the outcomes of this project will enable a better understanding of nonconvexity in low-rank matrix factorization, ultimately enhancing our ability to solve these problems in meaningful scales and with provable guarantees which will benefit companies and systems that use these applications.
