CISE Faculty Affiliate Ishwar Receives $1M NSF Grant
CISE Faculty Affiliate Prakash Ishwar, jointly with an interdisciplinary team of BU researchers, recently won a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation entitled “Multiplatform, Multilingual, and Multimodal Tools for Analyzing Public Communication in over 100 Languages”.
Professor Ishwar, a College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems engineering, will develop analytical tools examining public communications alongside Co-Principal Investigators Margrit Betke, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of computer science, Lei Guo, a College of Communication assistant professor of emerging media studies, and Derry Wijaya, a CAS assistant professor of computer science. The researchers will apply their expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and emerging media studies, to advance the intake and analysis of widespread information on the internet – such as words, pictures, posts, and videos – and measure public sentiment about any given event. This groundbreaking research aims to explore the relationship between the event itself, and how media outlets cover events.
An expert in machine learning, Professor Ishwar told BU Today, “Machine learning helps us scale up the processing and analysis of big data. It can never be a complete replacement of human expertise… but it is a catalyst which aids, accelerates, and amplifies human expertise-based analysis of data.”
In addition to machine learning, Professor Ishwar’s expertise includes information theory, information-theoretic security, statistical signal processing, and visual information analysis and processing. His current research centers on data science to advance statistical and computational tools for learning and inference problems using both model-based and data-driven methods.
In 2018, Professor Ishwar received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, as well as a Google Faculty Research Award jointly with Professor Betke and Professor Guo in the “Information Retrieval and Real Time Content” category.