AI Journey

Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering Farnaz Jahanbakhsh’s research begins from a conviction that has shaped everything she has built: people are fundamentally different from one another, and systems that ignore that fact — averaging across users, flattening difference into a single policy — are not just less ...

Zia Chi, Research Technology Specialist, DataLab, School of Social Work Zia Qi is, by her own description, “the one in the social work building who gets really excited about GPUs.” She was trained as a social worker but built her technical skills outside any curriculum — through real-world projects, deep self-directed learning, and the good ...

Hong Chen, PhD Student, School of Information Hong Chen opened with a scenario familiar to almost anyone who works in research: you follow a citation to its source and find that the original paper does not quite say what it was claimed to say. The hedging is gone. The scope has widened. The specific population ...

William Weaver, Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society William Weaver opened with a number that reframes the problem immediately: 400 million dried plant specimens stored in herbaria around the world. Only 48 million have been digitized. At current rates of manual transcription — 15 to 20 specimens per ...

Peter Bahr, Vice President and Managing Research Director, Strada Institute for the Future of Work Peter Bahr’s AI journey is unusual in this collection because the central tool he adopted is not a large language model, not a deep neural network, and not generative in any sense. It is a dimensionality reduction algorithm. But the ...

Hao-Wen Dong, Assistant Professor of Music, School of Music, Theatre & Dance Hao-Wen Dong’s project started as a course final project and grew into something considerably more ambitious: an attempt to build, from near-zero, the AI infrastructure that the a cappella research community needed but had never had. There was no large dataset. There were ...

Jingyi Qiu, PhD Student, School of Information Jingyi Qiu’s project began with a feeling familiar to anyone who reads machine learning papers: the abstract promised a breakthrough; the paper, on closer reading, delivered something considerably more modest. She wanted to know whether that gap — between what papers claim and what they show — could ...

David Sears, Associate Professor, Music Theory, School of Music, Theatre & Dance David Sears’s AI journey began on a Sunday afternoon spinning a virtual globe. Radio Garden — a web interface that lets listeners tune into live radio stations anywhere on Earth — confronted him with more musical diversity in thirty minutes than he had ...

Vijay Giri, Graduate Research Assistant, Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan – Dearborn Vijay Giri did not begin his project with a research hypothesis or a model architecture. He began with a conversation with a farmer. A Michigan asparagus grower described the decisions he faces every morning during harvest season ...