Dr. Una-May O'Reilly

Principal Research Scientist
Founder, Co-Leader, The Alfa Group: Any Scale Learning for All

Primary DLC

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

MIT Room: 32-D534

Areas of Interest and Expertise

Big Data Analysis
Cloud-Scale Machine Learning
Genetic Programming (Evolutionary Algorithms)
Applications in Knowledge Mining for Clinical Medicine
Data Science for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
Artificial Intelligence
Quantitative Modeling
Optimization
Regression
Wind Energy
Wind Turbine Layout Optimization
Wind Forecasting
Wind Resource Assessment
Medical Data Knowledge Mining
Genetic Algorithms
Estimation of Distribution Algorithms
Theory and Analysis of Genetic Programming
Machine Learning

Research Summary

The Any Scale Learning for All (ALFA) group focuses on scalable machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, and frameworks for large scale knowledge mining, prediction and analytics. The group has projects in clinical medicine knowledge discovery: arterial blood pressure forecasting and pattern recognition, diuretics in the ICU; wind energy: turbine layout optimization, resource prediction, cable layout; and MOOC Technology: MoocDB, student persistence and resource usage analysis.

Its research is in the design of scalable Artificial Intelligence systems that execute on a range of hardware systems: GPUs, workstations, grids, clusters, clouds and volunteer compute networks. These systems include machine learning components such as evolutionary algorithms (e.g. genetic programming, genetic algorithms and learning classifiers), classification, non-linear regression, and forecasting algorithms. They span the interpretation and analysis of raw data, through inference on conditioned exemplar data, to the deployment and evaluation of learned "algorithmic machines" in the original application context.

The group's has related technical interests in the development of enhanced evolutionary algorithms, particularly genetic programming for machine learning and automatic programming.


(summary updated 01/2015)

Recent Work

  • Video

    Una May O'Reilly - 2016-Digital-Health_Conf-videos

    September 14, 2016Conference Video Duration: 36:2

    Large Scale Like-Me for Signals: Eliminating the Big Data Bottleneck in Similarity-Based Signal Retrieval

    Can data series from a broad patient population be relevant and reliable tools in predicting individual outcomes when compared to personal wellness sensor data? Or, simply put from a patient perspective, “Can what happen to them, happen to me?” Retrieving and making use of “like-me” signal data based on similarity presents challenges far beyond digital marketing’s effectiveness in making targeted book and movie recommendations. By investigating and understanding those unique challenges, our research group has developed an approach based upon locality sensitive hashing (LSH). We will provide an update on our progress towards adapting LSH for fast and accurate Signal Like-Me capability.

    2016 MIT Digital Health Conference