Project Grant 2239622

The National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure awarded Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University a $499,999 Project Grant under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering federal grant program (CFDA 47.070). The five-year award will support research to advance data valuation techniques for machine learning applications.

Specifically, the university will conduct four research tasks to enable data valuation to overcome challenges related to applicability, scalability, reproducibility, and uncertainty in modern machine learning algorithms and training processes. Researchers will design robust data valuation methods, frameworks to determine data value with limited downstream task information, and principled approaches for heterogeneous and streaming data. They will also create an open-source, multi-faceted evaluation platform to facilitate future advances. The proposed techniques will be implemented and validated on real-world applications including autonomous vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, and conversational artificial intelligence. Undergraduate students will gain training in solving machine learning problems from algorithmic and data quality perspectives.