Jie Xu, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project “CAREER: Wireless InferNets: Enabling Collaborative Machine Learning Inference on the Network Path.”
Machine learning is increasingly being integrated into wireless network applications, such as video surveillance, smart healthcare and industrial internet of things, to derive actionable intelligence from the rich data collected or generated by wireless devices. To support real-time machine learning and decision making in these applications, a large amount of data must be transferred from the data source to the destination and processed by an inference algorithm in a timely manner. Traditionally, data transfer and machine learning inference are treated as two separate tasks, but such approaches are inefficient as they ignore the interaction between data transfer and machine learning inference, resulting in either a large data transfer delay or a large inference delay.
With support from the NSF’s prestigious Early CAREER award, Xu is investigating ways to streamline complex machine learning applications and mitigate their unwanted effects.
“This research will bridge the gap between theoretical foundations of machine learning and its real-world deployment, and catalyze a paradigm shift of future wireless networks to support emerging machine learning-powered applications and services,” Xu explained.
Xu’s CAREER project seeks to overcome the limitations of existing approaches by proposing wireless InferNets, a new wireless network architecture that enables collaborative machine learning inference among network nodes on the data transfer path. The successful completion of this CAREER project will promote the understanding of the synergy between distributed inference and networking and catalyze a paradigm shift of future wireless networks to support emerging applications and services in security, healthcare and other technological domains. The project also contains a significant educational component and provides abundant opportunities to nurture and attract students, especially from underrepresented groups, to engage in computer science and engineering.
Xu’s research focuses on edge computing, network security, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence for computer communication networks.
“The College of Engineering (CoE) is implementing a set of strategic thrusts, and Dr. Jie Xu will help advance the Data Sciences and Engineering effort in CoE and also help support the University’s efforts,” said Pratim Biswas, dean of the CoE. “He joins a list of junior faculty in CoE who have won the CAREER and PECASE Awards, and the support from these are helping advance the overall research mission of CoE.”
NSF CAREER Awards are prestigious and competitive awards given to junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their respective organizations.
