Allison Bishop Wins NSF CAREER Award Allison

The flip side of the data revolution is that massive data has rendered many standard algorithms computationally expensive, necessitating a wholesale rethinking of even the most basic computational methods. To take one example: Nearest neighbors search, the classic method since the 70s for finding similarity among objects, is straightforward for small data sets: compare every object to every other one and compute their similarity for each pair. But as the number of objects increases into the billions, computing time grows quadratically, making the task prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of traditional expectations.