Manocha Receives Verisk AI Faculty Research Award

Dinesh Manocha, a Distinguished University Professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, has received a 2022 Verisk AI Faculty Research Award from Verisk Analytics, a multinational data analytics and risk assessment firm.

The funding will support Manocha’s work on the generation and use of synthetic datasets to improve the accuracy of machine learning methods. These synthetic datasets can be combined with real-world datasets for training the neural networks.

This is the latest industry award for Manocha, who leads the Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) group at the University of Maryland. Previous industry funding includes awards from Intel, Google, Facebook (now Meta), Adobe, and ShareChat.

The Verisk faculty research program is intended to support new discoveries in artificial intelligence, machine learning and related areas of computer science, mathematics and engineering that will bolster future interactions between Verisk and top academic researchers.

In addition to the Verisk-funded research, Manocha and the 30-plus doctoral students he helps mentor in GAMMA are focused on artificial intelligence challenges related to robotics, autonomous driving, affective computing, activity recognition and document processing.