MIDAS Community Highlights

We celebrate the achievements of the U-M data science and AI researchers and students. The stories on this page are but a small sample of our research community’s great work.

U-M, AKU Collaboration will Establish the First Data Science Hub in East Africa

Internal Medicine Professor and MIDAS Affiliate faculty member, Dr. Akbar Waljee, in partnership with The Aga Khan University, has been awarded a $6.5 million NIH grant to establish a data science hub in East Africa to harness AI, machine learning, and other cutting edge data science to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes in local communities.

U-M Lab Awarded $13.2M Grant to Help Thwart Substance Abuse Disorders

Drs. Inbal (Billie) Nahum-Shani and Daniel Almirall, co-directors of the Data Science for Dynamic Intervention Decision-Making Lab (d3lab) at the Survey Research Center and MIDAS affiliate faculty, received a $13.2 million NIDA P50 grant awarded to MIDAS affiliate faculty members to launch the Center for Methodologies for Adapting and Personalizing Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services for Substance Use Disorder and HIV (MAPS Center).

U-M Students Win the 2020 ProjectX Machine Learning Competition

ProjectX is the largest undergraduate Machine Learning competition in the world. The 2020 U-M team (Sanjeev Raja, Zhizhuo Zhou, Anh Tuan Tran, Amanda Yao, Ziwei Tian and Eric Chen), selected by MIDAS and with Dr. Sindhu Kutty (Computer Science and Engineering) as their mentor, competed against 22 other teams from the U.S., Canada and Europe. They won the Weather and Natural Disaster Prediction category, earning a $20,000 prize and presented their research, “The Devil is in the Details: Spatial and Temporal Super-Resolution of Global Climate Models using Deep Learning.” at the University of Toronto’s AI Conference.

The 2021 U-M team is working on a healthcare research project, with MIDAS Senior Scientist, Dr. Jonathan Gryak, as their mentor.

MIDAS Student Leadership Board

Representing multiple schools, colleges, majors, and all three degree levels (Undergraduate, Masters, and Doctoral), the MIDAS Student Leadership Board, with its 10 members, organize events for career building, diversity, equity and inclusion and serve as the bridge between data science student community and MIDAS leadership. The Board organized a Women+ Data Science Skill Building series in 2020 and 2021 and career meetings with industry representatives. In the Winter 2022 Semester the board will continue the Women+ Data Science series and organize data science hackathons.

Return to MIDAS 2021 Highlights