Evolutionary approaches to big-data problems

The AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to solve the most challenging big-data problems -- questions that go beyond the scope of typical analytics. ALFA applies the latest machine learning and evolutionary computing concepts to target very complex problems that involve high dimensionality. "People have data coming at them from so many different channels these days," says ALFA director Una-May O'Reilly, a principal research scientist at CSAIL. "We're helping them connect and link the data between those channels." The ALFA Group has taken on challenges ranging from laying out wind farms to studying and categorizing the beats in blood pressure data in order to predict drops and spikes.