Yuxin Chen, an expert in data and information science, has received a 2020 Young Investigator Program award from the U. S. Army Research Office.

Chen, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, works on problems in the mathematical foundations of data science and machine learning. Modern information processing systems often work from data that is either incomplete or extremely "noisy." In a typical defense intelligence system, for example, data comes from a mix of different sensing technologies and needs to be interpreted in real time for urgent decision making. To separate the valuable information from the noise, Chen's research employs a range of computational approaches, drawing from statistics, signal processing and network science, with a strong emphasis on optimization.

The Army's award includes a $360,000 grant toward the development of algorithms, tailored to these highly noisy data sets, that quantify the uncertainty of the data and processes information in an efficient and reliable way.

“This research has the potential to improve current state-of-the-art Deep Structure Learning by unveiling some obscure and impeding conditions that potentially limit performance,” said Dr. Hamid Krim, program manager at the Army Research Office.

Chen joined the Princeton faculty in 2017. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University under the advisement of Andrea Goldsmith, the incoming dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is an associated faculty member in both computer science and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.