Professor Vipin Kumar (Head, Computer Science and Engineering; MSI Fellow) was featured in the Office of the Vice President for Research’s Annual State of Research Report. VP Brian Herman presented this report to the University Regents in December 2014.
Professor Kumar was the recipient of an OVPR Minnesota Futures grant; these seed grants help faculty advance new ideas and foster interdisciplinary research. Professor Kumar’s Futures project uses images collected by earth-observing satellites to understand changes in forest cover. This seed grant helped the Kumar group receive two additional grants: a $3.2 million grant from the Planetary Skin Institute and a $10 million “Expeditions in Computing” grant from the National Science Foundation.
Professor Kumar uses MSI to develop high-performance data-mining algorithms and tools for mining large-scale datasets in a variety of applications. The huge size of these datasets and their complexity require the use of the high-performance computing resources provided by MSI. Besides the project above, the Kumar group is also developing data-mining techniques for analyzing biomedical data.
You can read the entire Annual State of Research Report on the OVPR website. A more detailed story about Professor Kumar’s research also appears in the "Research excellence in practice" post on the OVPR’s Inquiry blog.