1M € DACCOMPLI Project Launched

We are very excited to be a key contributor to the DACCOMPLI (Dynamic Data Analytics through automatically Constructed Machine Learning Pipelines) Project, which was officially kicked off on 9 February 2018, with a meeting of all consortium members at LIACS, Leiden University. The project aims at developing a platform for dynamic data analytics based on techniques for automatically constructing machine learning pipelines for a broad range of real-world challenges, including dynamic management of energy stored in fleets of electric cars and prediction of Parkinson’s disease; it received one million euros in funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and private partners.

Consortium
The people involved in the project include Prof. Dr. Thomas Bäck (PI and adjunct member of ADA), Prof. Dr. Holger hoos (co-PI and head of ADA) and Can Wang (PhD student and member of ADA) from LIACS, Leiden University, as well as colleagues from Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH and the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC).

Project
The project will develop algorithm configuration approaches for composing, configuring, and parameterising data analytics pipelines from scratch – thereby automatically generating the best solutions for a broad range of data analytics tasks. To demonstrate the approach, two complementary practical application tasks have been selected: The early detection and treatment optimization for Parkinson’s disease, and the cost-effective and environmentally optimised management of energy for private households with electric vehicles. The first case deals with video recordings and slow dynamics over time (analyzing the progression of the disease over a series of diagnostic observations), while the second addresses numerical data with fast dynamics and the need for optimal decision making in real time. Our group is focussed on the second application, in cooperation with Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, as well as on foundational work together with TU Eindhoven on the automatic construction of data analytics pipelines (an application of AutoML), while work at TU Delft and is focussed on the Parkinson application.

Links: ADA Research Group ∙ LIACS ∙ Leiden University

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Inauguration of our new computing cluster GRACE

The inauguration of our new computing cluster, GRACE, took place at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, on 13 February 2018. Martijn Ridderbos (Vice-President of Leiden University), Geert de Snoo (Dean of the Faculty of Science) and Bart Hoogervorst (Head of Department Operations ICT Shared Service Centre) ceremonially booted up GRACE, the latest supercomputer at Leiden University.

GRACE consists of 32 computing nodes with 1024 CPU cores and 12 GPUs. It has a peak computing capacity of about 135 teraFLOPS and very fast interconnects (about 56 Gb/sec per link). The cluster is named after Grace Hopper, who was one of the first programmers and made significant contributions to the development of high-level programming languages.

GRACE was purchased by LIACS at the initiative of Prof. Holger H. Hoos (Head of the ADA Research Group). Equipped with it, the ADA Research Group will undertake cutting-edge research in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that complement, rather than replace, human intelligence. In particular, we will use GRACE for developing cutting-edge methods for the automated design and analysis of algorithms for computationally challenging problems from AI, leveraging human creativity, advanced machine learning and optimisation methods. An important part of our work is the development and deployment of AutoML and, more generally, AutoAI techniques, that are aimed at making the development, deployment and customisation of AI techniques accessible to non-experts.

Aside from the immense enjoyment of using GRACE for our research, we also had a lot of fun building the cluster, under the capable leadership of our ICT Manager, Vianney Govers.

Additional details can be found at ada.liacs.nl/hh/Talks/grace-inauguration-18.pdf.

Links: ADA Research Group ∙ LIACS ∙ Leiden University