Dr Qi Zhang Receives an NSF CAREER Award
We are proud to announce that Dr Qi Zhang has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award for his project titled "Identifying and Exploiting Multi-Agent Symmetries". The project's abstract:
It is widely believed by scientists that our universe follows certain symmetry patterns and principles, which lead to profound implications such as conservation laws. Artificial intelligence (AI) can and has already benefited tremendously from exploiting these symmetries. This project seeks to identify and exploit symmetries that are prevalent in cooperative AI tasks, where a group of multiple autonomous sequential decision makers, or agents, plan and learn to maximize their combined benefit. As an example, consider the application of adaptive traffic signal control, where each intersection can be modeled as an agent controlling its traffic signal in a way that adapts to real-time traffic conditions to reduce congestion. There exist certain symmetries when the topology of the road network is regular, e.g., as a 4-connected grid, and the road condition is uniform. When done properly, such multi-agent symmetries can be identified and exploited to greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the current solutions to cooperative AI. This project also integrates the proposed research into an array of education initiatives, playing key roles in the curriculum development and undergraduate research experiences at the PI's university, as well as outreach activities that bridge academia with industry practitioners and community stakeholders.
Faculty Feature: Christian O'Reilly
Christian O’Reilly, a faculty member at the University of South Carolina’s Artificial Intelligence Institute (AIISC) and an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, had extensive international experiences prior to arriving in Columbia in 2021. He worked in Switzerland on the internationally renowned Blue Brain Project and was postdoctoral fellow in Canada at the University of Montreal and McGill University. He has also completed research in identifying brain differences between neurotypical people and individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Read the rest here.
Amit Sheth: Artificial intelligence, real growth
In February, Amit Sheth, founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute of South Carolina, hosted Provost Donna Arnett, Vice President for Research Julius Fridriksson and College of Engineering and Computing Dean Hossein Haj-Haririto show off the institute’s ongoing success. President Michael Amiridis had already visited the institute in October.
Since its inception three and a half years ago, the institute has enjoyed rapid growth, earned significant accolades and fostered multiple partnerships in its efforts to infuse artificial intelligence expertise into the framework of research at South Carolina. Sheth and the five new faculty he helped recruit have secured funding for a growing team of over 40 researchers, including nearly 30 Ph.D. students funded through research grants. Read the rest of the article here.
Undergraduate junior student Daniel Gleaves published his research on deep learning models for new materials discovery
Our computer science junior student Daniel Gleaves from Prof. Jianjun Hu’s group published his research of deep learning algorithms for materials research in Digital Discovery Journal from Royal Society of Chemistry. In this work, he applied semi-supervised deep graph neural networks for material synthesizability and stability prediction. His models can achieve significantly better performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art PU learning methods with the true positive rate increased from 87.9% to 92.9% using 1/49 model parameters. His models can be combined with deep learning based generative material design models from Dr. Hu’s group for large-scale screening of novel functional materials. The accepted manuscript “Materials synthesizability and stability prediction using Semi-supervised teacher-student dual neural network” can be downloaded from here. Daniel was a recipient of USC Magellan Scholarship. Dr. Hu’s machine learning and evolution laboratory (MLEG) has involved dozens of undergraduate students in their cutting-edge research on AI for science and deep learning for materials discovery, which has already led to four journal publications in leading materials science journals. Interested highly motivated students can contact Dr. Hu by email.
New materials discovered in this research
Edward Sitar: CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Finalist
We are proud to report that Edward Sitar, has been selected as a Finalist for the 2023 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.
Alumnus Spotlight: Manas Gaur
“It was a very fascinating experience for me, in terms of the collaborations I was able to develop within a short span at USC,” says Dr. Manas Gaur who received a doctorate in computer science in August. Within a year of arriving in Columbia, he was given the opportunity to present his research at the Annual Computing Conference at the SEC Meeting. He was also a part of large team-based National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants with professors at USC.
Outside of his research, Gaur has tutored high school, undergraduate and graduate students from different backgrounds and institutions. He credits a fellowship at University of Chicago, where he was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellow in 2017, for his interest in giving back. In 2019, he received an AI for Social Good Fellowship from Dataminr Inc.
Read the full article at Artificial Intelligence, real application