Ju Sun Earns McKnight Land-Grant Professorship for AI Work
Department of Computer Science & Engineering Assistant Professor Ju Sun has earned the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship for his foundational and applied work in artificial intelligence (AI). The two-year grant, $50K program aims to advance the careers of new assistant professors at a crucial point in their professional lives.
“I think this is a big recognition of my research over the past five years or so,” Sun said. “I joined the University of Minnesota in 2019, and since then I have substantially expanded my research scope and developed new research programs. It will be a very powerful resource for me.”
Sun joined the University of Minnesota in 2019. He is the founder of the Group of Learning, Optimization, Vision, healthcarE, and X (GLOVEX), working at the intersection of machine learning, numerical optimization, computer vision, and data science. GLOVEX is working to develop theoretical foundations and computing tools to significantly reduce AI’s data dependency and boost AI’s reliability for high-stakes applications in science, engineering, and medicine, through deep interaction and integration with domain scientists.
“Broadly speaking, we are working on both the foundations of AI and the applications of AI,” Sun said. “AI is capable in a lot of areas, but we do not completely trust it yet because it can make mistakes in unpredictable ways. As AI becomes increasingly mature and gets deployed in new areas, we must think about the consequences of mistakes, especially in mission-critical scenarios like healthcare. We are working on improving the trustworthiness of AI and mitigating the consequences of mistakes.”
There are many fields that want to use AI, but don’t have enough data to train a model. Current AI models are largely built on big data. Sun’s group also aims to integrate traditional knowledge with AI training, instead of AI having to learn everything from scratch.
“On the application side, we have projects that try to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery and engineering designs by modeling reasonable, theoretical knowledge in a mature domain. We also work with a lot of medical researchers to come up with AI-based predictive models for rapid diagnosis, or the trajectory of a disease over time.”
Sun has led a number of AI-focused projects in medical research, such as his work with breast cancer treatment and COVID-19 diagnosis using x-rays. He received his Ph.D. (2016) in electrical engineering from Columbia University. Before joining the University, he served as a research engineer at the National University of Singapore from 2008-11 and as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2016-19.
Learn more about Sun’s research on the GLOVEX website.