Professor Long Nguyen has won a National Science Foundation CAREER award. The title of the award is "Geometric approaches to hierarchical and nonparametric model-based inference." According to Professor Nguyen, this research will improve our ability to manage, analyze and make decision with large-scale, high dimensional and complex data, especially in the research and applications of networks and the environment. The decentralized detection algorithms for highly distributed data sources have the potential of advancing the state of the art technologies that support data-driven and high-performance distributed computing architectures. As such, this research has the potential of extending the capabilities of the real-time detection and tracking devices currently deployed in the health-care and security domains. The optimal transport based theory will deepen our understanding of hierarchical Bayesian inference, a fundamental concept of modern statistics. The algorithms and geometric analyses will provide useful tradeoffs between statistical and computational complexity, an important issue lying in the interface of Statistics and Computer Science. This research will also provide support for broadening the current statistics curriculum at the University of Michigan. The PI will integrate the teaching of statistical and computational tools with modern applications, by developing synthesis courses which interact closely with research topics of the project.  This provides an excellent opportunity to train students with a broad base of knowledge and cross-disciplinary skills in the fields of statistics, probability, machine learning, distributed computation and networked systems.