Collaborative Research: PPoSS: LARGE: Principles and Infrastructure of Extreme Scale Edge Learning for Computational Screening and Surveillance for Health Care

This project investigates a completely new cross-disciplinary concept of “Computational Screening and Surveillance (CSS)” that utilizes edge learning to detect early indicators of diseases, and monitor health changes in both individuals and populations. CSS analyzes and interprets continuous and heterogeneous physical and physiologic sensing data streams of human subjects to produce real-time information, knowledge, and insights about their health status.

The project’s novelty is a data-driven paradigm that revolutionizes the understanding, prediction, intervention, treatment, and management of acute/infectious, chronic physical and psychological diseases. The project’s impacts are enormous social and economic benefits to individuals, organizations, and the healthcare system: early detection, preemptive intervention and management can lead to greatly improved quality of care, and huge savings for multiple diseases each costing hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

The investigators design, develop and evaluate principles and solutions for CSS enabled by extreme-scale edge learning spanning four dimensions: data modalities, health conditions and data patterns, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) algorithms and models, and individuals/populations. The design is guided by four principles: exploit scale and heterogeneity, design for uncertainty, privacy as a first-class citizen, and faults, attacks as a norm.

The investigators will 1) design AI/ML algorithms for learning data patterns and correlations for diverse health conditions in both individuals and populations at extreme scales; 2) quantify theoretical bounds on the tradeoffs between security, privacy protection, and learning accuracy in order to protect against various attacks on data and models at both the edge and cloud; 3) develop programming abstractions for automated exploration of competing AI/ML methods under uncertainty, and system mechanisms to protect stream processing integrity against sensitive data disclosure and faulty/malicious analytics; and 4) devise neural architectures and accelerators for computation efficiency at the constrained edge, data efficiency using limited training sets, and human efficiency utilizing AutoML.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.