René Vidal and team receive MoDL award from the National Science Foundation-Simons Foundation
René Vidal, the director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS) and the Herschel L. Seder Professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, is leading a team of engineers, mathematicians, and theoretical computer scientists from multiple institutions who seek to revolutionize our understanding of the mathematical and scientific foundations of deep learning.
Their project, Collaborative Research: Transferable, Hierarchical, Expressive, Optimal, Robust, and Interpretable NETworks (THEORINET), is funded by the National Science Foundation-Simons Foundation’s Research Collaborations on the Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning (MoDL) program and will receive ten million dollars over five years. The Johns Hopkins-led consortium is one of only two teams that were awarded funding for this national effort.
THEORINET researchers will develop a mathematical, statistical, and computational framework that will explain the success of current deep network architectures, understand their pitfalls, and guide the design of novel architectures with guaranteed, robustness, interpretability, optimality, and transferability.