Chi receives five-year $500,000 NSF CAREER award
Modern technology created an influx of useful data, helping people in countless ways. However, the ability to continually manage that data and translate it into actionable information efficiently remains challenging.
Yuejie Chi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical informatics, received a $500,000 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research that seeks to build a unified framework to manage data more strategically for the greater good.
The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of both.
Society is being impacted positively in many ways through a surge of data-driven reforms, Chi explained, whether through medical and biological imaging, social and wireless sensor networks, internet-of-things, recommendation systems or others.
“Increasingly, the large volume of data is acquired in an unreliable and poorly calibrated manner, making it difficult to translate into actionable knowledge for decision making using existing methodologies," she said.
Building upon recent advances in signal processing that enable self-calibration, Chi’s NSF CAREER research proposal is motivated by the challenge of efficiently extracting information embedded in a large amount of data, such as the mathematics of data representation that take advantage of structures and geometry to minimize complexity and improve performance. Specific topics include mathematical and statistical signal processing, compressed sensing, machine learning and information theory.
“The success of this project will have far-reaching impacts on many applications in sensing and imaging science,” she said.
Also important, Chi said, is its potential impact on the classrooms of tomorrow. The data management research can help further encourage young students toward STEM education by developing tailored educational components for students at all levels, designing signal processing modules that are appropriate for dissemination to K-12 students, and involving women and underrepresented students to promote their success through outreach activities.
Chi earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2012, the same year she joined the Ohio State faculty. In addition to the CAREER award, she has also received research funding awards from the Office of Naval Research, as part of the Young Investigator Program, and from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Research Program.
contributions from Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
