With a new $1.5 million grant, the growing field of transfer learning has come to the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. The grant was awarded to three professors -- Salman Avestimehr, Antonio Ortega and Mahdi Soltanolkotabi -- who will work with Ilias Diakonikolas at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to address the theoretical foundations of this field. Modern machine learning models are breaking new ground in data science, achieving unprecedented performance on tasks like classifying images in one thousand different image categories. This is achieved by training gigantic neural networks. "Neural networks work really well because they can be trained on huge amounts of pre-existing data that has previously been tagged and collected," said Avestimehr, the primary investigator of the project.