The Rutgers Computer Science Department is excited to share that Assistant Professor Karthik Srikanta has received an NSF CAREER award for his proposal, Price of Clustering in Geometric Spaces: Inapproximability, Conditional Lower Bounds, and More.
Clustering is the task of grouping objects so that those in the same group are more similar than those in other groups. It is widely used in unsupervised learning, data analysis, information retrieval, and community detection. This project contributes to the theory of clustering by aiming to understand the extent to which clustering can be efficiently approximated by leveraging tools and ideas from metric embedding, coding theory, extremal combinatorics, and analysis of Boolean functions. Seeking the optimal inapproximability of clustering not only sheds light on problems important to the theoretical computer science community but also enriches other fields such as machine learning, data science, and computer vision, equipping future researchers in all these fields to tackle other geometric optimization problems effectively. The educational activities of this project include integrating findings into graduate and undergraduate courses, mentoring students, and broadening participation in theoretical computer science.
This is a five-year award of $649,200. Please join us in congratulating Karthik Srikanta.
To learn more: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2443697
