NSF – FAST Workshop

The emergence of big data has been transformational in many areas in science and engineering – biology, health sciences, material science, physics, and so on. At the heart of this transformation is statistical machine learning, subfield of computer science that aims at studying and developing algorithms that can analyze large volumes of data. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers, both from USA and Armenia, who work on machine learning (ML) and other scientific disciplines that are poised to benefit from the recent advances in ML. During the Soviet times, Armenia was one of the main hubs of cybernetics research in ex-Soviet Union, where centers such as the Mergelyan Institute (one of the three major producers of computer equipment in former USSR), and the Computing Center of the National Armenian Academy of Science (currently the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems) conducted cutting edge research on topics ranging from robotics to algorithmic game theory to automated machine translation. Currently, Armenia has a small but vibrant research community in machine learning and data science, some members of which have participated in past and present DoD-sponsored research projects in collaboration with US colleagues.