Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech Professor Faramarz Fekri recently won the Sony Innovation Research Award for his work “Distributed Machine Learning with Minimum Communication Overhead.” The grant, which started in July 2018, is funded at $100,000 and is good for one year with the option to extend it for an additional year.

The work involves overcoming communication overhead, often a bottleneck in distributed learning and implementations of deep models. Advancement in this space would allow companies to scale up the number of workers leading to accelerated training and computations. Fekri's focus is on the challenges encountered due to transferring data and information (such as parameters of the model) among workers or between workers and a central node. During this project, Fekri will introduce solutions to overcome these issues.

“I am honored to receive this grant and am looking forward to the progress that will be made with Sony’s support. My hope is that this work will lead to more efficient communication between distributed learning and the implementation of deep learning models,” said Fekri.