SciTech projects

Strategic, multidisciplinary research projects directed by DIREC researchers – often in collaboration with external partners – aim to deliver value for both the scientific world and society. The purpose of the SciTech projects is to expand the research and education capacity at the universities.

SciTech project

Online Algorithms with Predictions

Our focus is on improving optimization algorithms in online decision-making. Using techniques from online algorithms for solving optimization problems, we can provide worst-case guarantees, but normal (averagecase) behavior may not be satisfactory. Using techniques from machine learning, we can often provide good behavior in practice, but guarantees are lacking, and in particular missing for situations not captured by the training data. We aim at combining the best features from these two areas.

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SciTech project

Benefit and Bias of Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search for Machine Learning and Data Mining

The search for nearest neighbors is an emerging and increasingly vital component in data analysis tasks, for example using vector embedding databases. Typically, the search is the bottleneck in terms of efficiency. Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search methods are often employed to speed up the application. However, different methods for ANN search come with different biases that can be positive or negative for the downstream application. In this project, the bias of different ANN methods and its impact on different applications will be studied.

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SciTech project

Privacy and Machine Learning

There is an unmet need for decentralised privacy-preserving machine learning. Cloud computing has great potential, however, there is a lack of trust in the service providers and there is a risk of data breaches. A lot of data are private and stored locally for good reasons, but combining the information in a global machine learning system could lead to services that benefit all.

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SciTech project

Machine Learning Algorithms Generalisation

AI is radically changing society and the main driver behind new AI methods and systems is machine learning. Machine learning focuses on finding solutions for, or patterns in, new data by learning from relevant existing data. Thus, machine learning algorithms are often applied to large datasets and then they more or less autonomously find good solutions by finding relevant information or patterns hidden in the data.

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