2023 Awardees

The Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS) announced the awardees of the 2023 round of Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grants. Nine teams will receive funding support for a wide range of exciting projects with data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the common thread, including topics such as multimodal learning for disease prediction, using video data to study political discourse, text analysis to detect and reduce bias in graduate admissions, and explainable AI for building trust in AI-aided decisions.

The 2023 awardees are:

  • From ground to air, and the traveler experiences in-between: Human-centered data-driven performance measures for multimodal transportation systems
    Atiyya Shaw (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Max Li (Aerospace Engineering and Industrial and Operations Engineering
  • A Data Science Toolkit for Examining Local Governance
    Justine Zhang (School of Information) and Yanna Krupnikov (Communications & Media)
  • Bayesian modeling of multi-source phenology to forecast airborne allergen concentration
    Kai Zhu (School for Environment and Sustainability) and Kerby Shedden (Statistics)
  • Interpretable machine learning to identify tumor spatial features from longitudinal multi-modality images for personalized progression risk prediction of poor prognosis head and neck cancer
    Lise Wei (Radiation Oncology) and Liyue Shen (Computer Science and Engineering)
  • MI-SPACE: Multiplex Imaging based Spatial Analysis for Discovery of Cellular Interactions in the Tumor Microenvironment
    Maria Masotti (Biostatistics)
  • Detecting and Countering Untrustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) through AI Literacy
    Nikola Banovic (Computer Science and Engineering)
  • Foundations of Sequence Models for Learning, Estimation, and Control of Dynamical Systems
    Samet Oymak (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Necmiye Ozay (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Robotics)
  • Neural Quantum States at Scale: Applications in Sciences and Engineering
    Shravan Veerapaneni and James Stokes (Mathematics)
  • Machine-Processing of Graduate Student Applications for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
    Wenhao Sun (Materials Science and Engineering) and Dallas Card (School of Information)

Since 2016, MIDAS has been offering funding to U-M faculty to enable groundbreaking disciplinary and interdisciplinary research through data science and AI, making it possible for research teams to form many new collaborations, formulate groundbreaking ideas, and secure external funding to expand their work.

As of 2022, a total of $12M MIDAS funding has jump-started 63 research projects, which expanded into 112 follow-on projects with $114M of external funding. In addition, “year after year, the applicants propose to employ increasingly more sophisticated data science and AI methods to address increasingly more profound research questions,” says Dr. H. V. Jagadish, Director of MIDAS. “This reflects the rapid advancement of data science and AI and their transformation of science and society, and U-M researchers are at the forefront of it.”

The 2023 PODS teams presented their projects at the U-M Annual Data Science and AI Summit, held on November 13–14, 2023.

Watch the Presentation
Propelling Original Data Science
MIDAS offers the Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) grants annually. This funding is for projects lead by U-M faculty.