In the News Feb. 2024
LCCMR Research Grant on Robotics for Water Quality Monitoring
Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos (Computer Science and Engineering), David Mulla (Soil, Water and Climate), Junaed Sattar (Computer Science & Engineering), and Travis Henderson (MnRI) were approved by LCCMR (the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources) for a $353,000 research grant on "Water Quality and Robots: Experientially Educating Minnesotan Youth" (grant period July 1, 2024-June 30, 2026). The LCCMR projects are currently pending House and Senate approvals.
Data Science Initiative Large Seed Grant
Rachel Hawe (School of Kinesiology) and Stephen Guy (Computer Science & Engineering) were awarded a $77,000 DSI Large Seed Grant titled “Data-driven Metrics for Upper-Limb Motor Assessment in Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders.”
Ju Sun Receives NIH Funding for Medical AI Projects
Ju Sun (Department of Computer Science & Engineering) is a Co-PI/ PI on two new medical artificial intelligence (AI) projects from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Sun’s Group of Learning, Optimization, Vision, healthcarE, and X (GLOVEX) works at the intersection of machine and deep learning, numerical optimization, computer vision, and data science. Sponsored by NIH, Sun has partnered with Associate Professor Christine Conelea (PI) from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota on a project titled, “Quantification of Tics in Tourette’s Syndrome”. The $3.3 million project uses computer vision techniques to analyze video recordings of patients to detect tics - sudden twitches, movements, or sounds that people with Tourette’s Syndrome repeat uncontrollably. Sun is the PI on another project where he is working with Rui Zhang, the founding division chief of Computational Health Sciences in the Department of Surgery at the U of M, on a project to develop an innovative AI-driven computational framework that addresses data imbalance issues in biomedical data science. Funded by the National Cancer Institute of NIH, this $1.2 million grant will specifically focus on imbalanced learning in the context of cardiotoxicity prediction for breast cancer survivors.
New Autonomous Vehicle Research Grants
Rajesh Rajamani and Brian Davis from Mechanical Engineering are Co-PIs on two new projects related to autonomous vehicle control for rural applications. One of these projects is funded by the Minnesota Local Road Research Board ($178,775 in direct costs) and another by a CTS Seed Grant ($75,000 in direct costs).
McKnight Land-Grant Professorship for Ryan Caverly
Ryan Caverly is one of six College of Science and Engineering faculty members selected for the 2024 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, an award given to early-career faculty who have the potential to make big impacts in their fields. Recipients are chosen based on merit, professional promise, quality of publication record, and originality and innovation in research achievements. They hold the designation of “McKnight Land-Grant Professor” for a two-year period and receive a research grant of $25,000 in each year of that appointment. Prof. Caverly’s research interests include dynamic modeling and control systems, with a focus on robotic and aerospace applications, as well as robust and optimal control techniques. Among his work is a NASA-sponsored project—that he was recently invited to discuss on "Spaceflight Mechanics: The Cornell Space Technology Podcast”—to develop a solar sail attitude control technology, which could enable future science missions for heliophysics and other deep space science.