Jie Ding Receives Army Research Office Early Career Program Award

The Army Research Office (ARO) has awarded Assistant Professor Jie Ding its Early Career Program (ECP) award, one of the most prestigious honors bestowed by the Army on outstanding young scientists. 

“The central objective of our proposal is to undertake a comprehensive exploration of information fusion from various data sources,” says Ding. The information fusion process he describes involves collecting multiple streams of varied data and using it to create a more complete perspective of a situation. For instance, vehicle GPS information, traffic camera details, and local weather reports might be collected and combined to educate traffic managers about road conditions, rather than relying on a single type of data. 

This research has numerous potential applications in ensemble decision-making and cost-effective crowdsourcing. It can be especially beneficial to employ in sectors like healthcare, finance, and logistics, where fusing complex data for precise predictions is challenging and crucial. For instance, the results of Ding’s research could help to extract and synthesize healthcare intelligence from body scans (MRIs, PET scans, and the like), a person’s medical history, clinical trials, and more, ultimately enabling doctors to tailor medical treatments to an individual's specific situation.  

Ding elaborates: “Our research aims to develop high-performance algorithms that will be instrumental in extracting crucial, actionable information from a diverse range of sources. A unique aspect of our proposed work is the emphasis on uncertainty quantification, which is key to creating robust and reliable systems.”

For Ding, this award holds great significance, affirming the relevance of his research and providing essential support for its implementation. “It will guide my humble efforts to contribute further to our understanding of the field,” he says.