DSP Alum Tom Goldstein Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award

Rice DSP alum Tom Goldstein (postdoc 2012-2014) has received a DARPA Young Faculty Award for a project entitled Self-Assessing Network Models for Big Data Summarization.  There are many complex tasks that neither a human nor a computer can complete alone.  An example is searching a large image database: a human does not have the bandwidth to examine millions of images, while a neural network has the needed bandwidth, but lacks the intelligence to analyze complex or unusual images that lie far from its training distribution.  Tom's project will enhance human-computer teaming by giving machines the ability to assess their own performance and self confidence. This way, machines can act independently, and then ask their human collaborators for help when it is needed.

Tom is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. He has previously been awarded the SIAM DiPrima Prize and a Sloan Fellowship.