New York, Nov. 8 (IANS) Indian-American professor of computer science Pavithra Prabhakar has been awarded a research grant from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) to create a tool that minimises unpleasant customer experiences.
One of 74 recipients of the Amazon awards was Prabhakar, who holds the Peggy and Gary Edwards chair in engineering. Prabhakar’s prize package also includes an unrestricted gift, access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and artificial intelligence and machine learning tools and services from Amazon Web Services.
As machine learning-based software systems are improved and retrained over time, the technology created by Prabhakar will be used to reduce disruptive changes to user experience.
The project’s overarching goal, according to Prabhakar, is to automatically determine how much two machine learning-based system versions differ or are similar.
She added that although these systems are frequently retrained to attain improved performance, a better user experience is not always the result.
This can be reduced by providing the design team with an automated tool that can show where and how much the systems changed between different versions, helping the team decide whether the changes are acceptable from the standpoint of the user experience, according to Prabhakar.
According to a news release from Kansas State University, the automated tool will help design teams in making crucial decisions regarding enhancing user experience of machine learning-based intelligent software systems.
After earning her doctorate in computer science and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Prabhakar completed a postdoctoral study at the California Institute of Technology’s Center for the Mathematics of Information.
She was awarded the dean’s award for outstanding research from the Carl R Ice College of Engineering and was appointed a Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone research scholar.
Numerous important honours have been given to Prabhakar for his research, including the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Union, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the NSF CAREER award.
