Katerina Fragkiadaki, an assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department, is one of 36 scientists and engineers nationwide — and one of just two from Carnegie Mellon University — to receive funding this year through the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program (YIP).

Giulia Fanti, an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department who has a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science Department, also won a YIP grant.

The YIP aims to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and related challenges in science and engineering. Recipients receive a three-year grant totaling $450,000.

The award will support Fragkiadaki's efforts to develop multimodal perception systems that use lifelong learning to improve their performance with little human guidance. This continual-learning framework would acquire common-sense knowledge about the world through agents embodied in simulated and real-world scenes. The agents would sense, move in and interact with their environments. They also would interact with human analysts who narrate and explain events in natural language.

Fragkiadaki earned her bachelor's degree at the National Technical University of Athens, and her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining CMU, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Google Research.

Earlier this year, Fragkiadaki received the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.