Vishal Patel, an assistant professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to work on his project, titled “Active and rapid domain generalization.”
Patel’s research will aim to construct meta-learning techniques to enable efficient adaptation to unseen domains, develop an optimal reinforcement learning strategy for querying additional information, build algorithmic foundations for detecting the presence of domain shifts. The project combines recent advances in variational inference, reinforcement learning, and active learning to bring a modern and unique perspective on how to deal with the problem of domain shift.
This project is in collaboration with Hien Van Nguyen of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, which makes the research even more exciting for Patel.
“I’m very excited to receive this award as visual domain adaptation is something that I have been working on for the past few years,” Patel said. “This work has a lot of implications and applications in a number of different fields including medical imaging, computer vision, self-driving cars and speech recognition.”