$1.2M Northrop Grumman Grant Funds UMD-Led Machine Learning Team

UMD machine learning researchers are helping to lead Northrop Grumman Corp.’s new industry-academia consortium, Research in Applications for Learning Machines (REALM). The company announced yesterday that it has given $1.2 million in research funding to three multi-university team partners.

The project is led by Distinguished University Professor and Minta Martin Professor of Engineering Rama Chellappa. He is joined by Professors Rene Vidal and Vishal Patel from the Johns Hopkins University, and Professor Aswin Sankaranarayanan from Carnegie Mellon University.

“Over the last decade, machine learning and AI have become the dominant technologies in many sectors,” said Chellappa, who holds appointments in UMD’s Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). “By giving this grant to the UMD-led team, Northrop Grumman is enabling the incorporation of machine learning and AI technologies for understanding multisensor and multimodal data.”

The UMD-led team is exploring concepts such as learning from few labels, domain adaptation of object detection, tracking and recognition algorithms across multisensors, and building 3D models from aerial and ground-based images using generative adversarial networks.

“In today’s environment, machine learning, cognition and artificial intelligence are dramatically reshaping the way machines support customers in their mission,” said Eric Reinke, vice president and chief scientist, mission systems, Northrop Grumman.