Mark Draelos

Mark Draelos

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My work focuses on image-guided medical robots with an emphasis on clinical translation. My interests include medical robotics, biomedical imaging, data visualization, medical device development, and real-time algorithms.

A major ongoing project is the development of robotic system for automated eye examination. This system relies on machine learning models for tracking and eventually for interpretation of collected data. Other projects concern the live creation of virtual reality scenes from volumetric imaging modalities like optical coherence tomography and efficient acquisition strategies for such purposes.

Qiong Yang

Qiong Yang

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My research program at the University of Michigan (UM) integrates the fields of biophysics, quantitative systems biology, and bottom-up synthetic biology to understand complex stochastic cellular and developmental processes in early embryos.
We have developed innovative computational and experimental techniques in microfluidics and imaging to allow high-throughput quantitative manipulation and single-cell lineage tracking of cellular spatiotemporal dynamical processes in various powerful in vitro and in vivo systems we established in my lab. These systems range from cell-free extracts, synthetic cells reconstituted in microemulsion droplets, presomitic mesoderm (PSM) and progenitor zone (PZ) cells dissociated from the zebrafish tail buds, their re-aggregated 2D and 3D cell-cell communications, ex vivo live tissue explants, and live embryos.
Our current research questions center around the understanding of the design-function relation of robust biological timing, growth, and patterning, how individual molecules and cells communicate to generate collective patterns, and how biochemical, biophysical, and biomechanical signals work together to shape morphogenesis during early embryo development.

Chuan Zhou

Chuan Zhou

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With a passion for developing decision support systems that integrate cutting edge techniques from artificial intelligence, quantitative image analysis, computer vision, and multimodal biomedical data fusion. Research interests have been focusing on characterizing diseases abnormalities and predicting their likelihood of being significant, with the goal to enable early diagnosis and risk stratification, as well as aiding treatment decision making and monitoring.

Bing Ye

Bing Ye

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The focus of our research is to address (1) how neuronal development contributes to the assembly and function of the nervous system, and (2) how defects in this process lead to brain disorders. We take a multidisciplinary approach that include genetics, cell biology, developmental biology, biochemistry, advanced imaging (for neuronal structures and activity), electrophysiology, computation (including machine learning and computer vision) and behavioral studies.

We are currently studying the neural basis for decision accuracy. We established imaging and computational methods for analyzing neural activities in the entire central nervous system (CNS) of the Drosophila larva. Moreover, we are exploring the possibility of applying the biological neural algorithms to robotics for testing these algorithms and for improving robot performance.

A major goal of neuroscience is to understand the neural basis for behavior, which requires accurate and efficient quantifications of behavior. To this end, we recently developed a software tool—named LabGym—for automatic identification and quantification of user-defined behavior through artificial intelligence. This tool is not restricted to a specific species or a set of behaviors. The updated version (LabGym2) can analyze social behavior and behavior in dynamic backgrounds. We are further developing LabGym and other computational tools for behavioral analyses in wild animals and in medicine.

The behavior that this chipmunk performed was identified and quantified by LabGym, an AI-based software tool that the Ye lab developed for quantifying user-defined behaviors.

The behavior that this chipmunk performed was identified and quantified by LabGym, an AI-based software tool that the Ye lab developed for quantifying user-defined behaviors.

What are some of your most interesting projects?

1) Develop AI-based software tools for analyzing the behavior of wild animals and human.
2) Use biology-inspired robotics to test biological neural algorithms.

How did you end up where you are today?

Since my teenage years, I have been curious about how brains (human’s and animals’) work, enjoyed playing with electronics, and learning about computational sciences. My curiosity and opportunities led me to become a neuroscientist. When I had my own research team and the resources to explore my other interests, I started to build simple electronic devices for my neuroscience research and to collaborate with computational scientists who are experts in machine learning and computer vision. My lab now combines these approaches in our neuroscience research.

What makes you excited about your data science and AI research?

I am very excited about the interactions between neuroscience and data science/AI research. This is a new area and has great potential of changing the society.

jjpark

Jeong Joon Park

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3D reconstruction and generative models. I use neural and physical 3D representations to generate realistic 3D objects and scenes. The current focus is large-scale, dynamic, and interactable 3D scene generations. These generative models will be greatly useful for content creators, like games or movies, or for autonomous agent training in virtual environments. For my research, I frequently use and adopt generative modeling techniques such as auto-decoders, GANs, or Diffusion Models.

In my project “DeepSDF,” I suggested a new representation for a 3D generative model that made a breakthrough in the field. The question I answered is: “what should the 3D model be generating? Points, meshes, or voxels?” In DeepSDF paper, I proposed that we should generate a “function,” that takes input as a 3D coordinate and outputs a field value corresponding to that coordinate, where the “function” is represented as a neural network. This neural coordinate-based representation is memory-efficient, differentiable, and expressive, and is at the core of huge progress our community has made for 3D generative modeling and reconstruction.

3D faces with apperance and geometry generated by our AI model

Two contributions I would like to make. First, I would like to enable AI generation of large-scale, dynamic, and interactable 3D world, which will benefit entertainment, autonomous agent training (robotics and self-driving) and various other scientific fields such as 3D medical imaging. Second, I would like to devise a new and more efficient neural network architecture that mimics our brains better. The current AI models are highly inefficient in terms of how they learn from data (requires a huge number of labels), difficult to train continuously and with verbal/visual instructions. I would like to develop a new architecture and learning methods that address these current limitations.

Corey Lester

Corey Lester

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I am an expert in the use of artificial intelligence and data science applications to improve medication use. My work focuses on solving medication-related problems with health data through measurement of their effects on human work and decision-making.

Runzi Wang

Runzi Wang

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Runzi Wang is a transdisciplinary researcher who studies change in natural and urban environments across space and over time, with the objective of driving positive change with ecological planning and design strategies. Combining technologies such as big data, machine learning, remote sensing, and spatial statistics, her primary research explores how land cover change and urban development pattern influence stream water quality and stormwater quality at the watershed basis, together with various environmental, climatic, and sociocultural factors. By enhancing the interpretability of machine learning in its application to landscape architecture, the most innovative part of her research is to uncover the nonlinear, interacted relationships between environmental, technological, and sociocultural dimensions of landscape systems.

What are some of your most interesting projects?

  1. I conducted the first continental-scale urban stream water quality study funded by MIDAS. We applied geospatial analysis to investigate the characteristics of the built environment (e.g., building footprint, street length, land use spatial pattern) associated with urban stream water quality, the social inequities regarding exposure to stream water contamination, as well as the spatial variations in the above processes. We developed data integration protocols for data from remote sensing products, in-situ observations, and the US Census Bureau. Using Bayesian hierarchical models, we concluded that watersheds with a higher percentage of minorities are associated with higher nutrient pollution, with the relationship being more significant in the American Northwest.
  2. I investigated how land use planning and best management practices mitigated climate change effects on Lake Erie’s water quality. With the integration of longitudinal watershed land cover, agricultural, and climatic data from 1985-2017, we found that no-tillage and reduced tillage management were effective mitigation strategies that could decrease water quality sensitivity to climate change. We plan to advance this work by fusing remote sensing-based bloom detection and process-based simulation to investigate how climate change, land cover change, and anthropogenic activities will impact the eutrophication of Lake Erie.

How did you end up where you are today?

I have a highly interdisciplinary background, receiving training in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, statistics, hydrology and water quality, and broader social science topics. This forms my research topic to study the relationships between people, land, and water. Specifically, I study the interconnectedness between people living in the watershed, the land use and urban form of the watershed’s built form, the resulting water quality conditions, and the ecosystem services urban streams provide for people. This background also leverages many different methodologies in my work, including data science, hydrological models, social science methods, and so on. In addition, the most important thing about my research journey is that I have a few excellent friends/researchers who help me a lot on my way and make my research life inspiring and delightful most of the time.

Ken Resnicow

Ken Resnicow

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Dr. Resnicow studies tailored behavior change interventions, natural language processing of clinical encounters, analyses of large datasets related to obesity and other chronic diseases, novel designs such as SMART, MOST, and reinforcement learning, and applied complex systems and chaos theory in behavior change.

Liang Zhao

Liang Zhao

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I am working on analyzing the solar wind plasma measurements obtained by multiple space missions. Especially, I am interested in the solar wind heavy ion elemental abundance and charge states measured by SWICS on Ulysses and ACE and HIS onboard Solar Orbiter mission. Applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms on solar wind plasma classification and heliophysics parameter prediction are a brand new research area that we have been working on.

Additional Information

What are some of your most interesting projects?

How did you end up where you are today?

What is the most significant scientific contribution you would like to make?

What makes you excited about your data science and AI research?

What are 1-3 interesting facts about yourself?

Lise Wei

Lise Wei

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My research focuses on developing machine learning and statistical methods to analyze multi-modality data for patient outcome modeling. These models can be used to personalize cancer patients’ treatment and improve their prognosis. We emphasize on interpretable AI in health care to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that contribute to the specific outcomes for different individuals to provide robust treatment assist for sequential decision making in the practice.