School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) first-year Ph.D. student Koby Hayashi won the highly competitive Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) for 2019-2020.

According to the DOE CSGF alumni listing, Hayashi is the first Georgia Tech recipient of this award since 2011 and the first-ever recipient of this award from the College of Computing. 

Since its establishment in 1991, the DOE CSGF has provided benefits and opportunities to students pursuing doctoral degrees in fields that use high-performance computing (HPC) to solve complex science and engineering problems. 

“Many fields at this time are suffering from a number of big data problems. HPC is not exempt from this issue,” said Hayashi. “Through my research, I am aiming to develop tools that alleviate issues for applications that produce data that is too large or too complex to be stored and analyzed with HPC.”

Hayashi’s focus in HPC examines applications in data analysis and emphasizes scalable algorithms and software for the mining, analysis, and compression of data that may be modeled by tensors and hypergraphs.  

“Specifically, my focus is on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and its variants, tensor factorizations and joint factorizations,” he said. “My goal is to demonstrate the usefulness of these methods combined with developing efficient implementations to allow researchers in various domains to utilize them in their work.”

CSE Professors Haesun Park and Rich Vuduc advise Hayashi.

“This is a very exciting and well-deserved opportunity,” said Vuduc. “What makes Koby’s proposed research, which is on graph and hypergraph clustering using NMF and tensor methods, especially impactful is his emphasis on interpretability, which is basically giving end-users analysis results that are easier to understand."

The DOE CSGF will provide Hayashi with a yearly stipend of $37,000, payment of full tuition and required fees during the appointment period, an academic allowance, up to four years of total support, and a 12-week practicum experience at one of the 21 DOE national laboratories or sites.