Cyber-physical systems grant combines with Brigham and Women’s share to total $1.1 million in funds
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Associate Professor of Computer & Information Science Ming Shao was recently awarded a $512,105 cyber-physical systems (CPS) grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project titled AI-Boosted Precision Medicine through Continual in situ Monitoring of Microtissue Behaviors on Organs-on-Chips, in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Inc. Shao is the primary investigator and UMass Dartmouth is the lead institute.
“The goal of this project is to develop an engineered cyber-physical system that combines advanced biological models with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence methods for predictive, automated screening of anti-cancer drugs and optimizations of their dosing,” says Shao.
“This will move science towards realizing the long-desired precision medicine paradigm leading to significant social impacts. The project will provide opportunities to promote STEM education for K-12 students, especially those from under-represented groups, and disseminate science and engineering knowledge to the public.”
This grant, which combines with Brigham and Women’s share to total $1.1 million, will support Shao and his research team’s development of accurate, data-driven predictive learning models and joint Bayes’ models to enable a “multi-sensor-integrated multi-organ-on-a-chip" platform. This is Shao’s second NSF grant in two months, also being awarded a CAREER award for the project, Enabling Continual Multi-view Representation Learning: An Adversarial Perspective in July.
“These awards witness the growing footprint of UMass Dartmouth in research in the recent years, and particularly in AI, data science, and cybersecurity. I am excited to launch these new projects, and work closely with my students and collaborators from the Greater Boston and SouthCoast areas,” says Shao.
Dr. Shao was appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at UMass Dartmouth in 2016. Since joining UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Shao has secured funding from several sources for $3.17M, including NSF, ONR, NOAA, Mass.gov, Adobe, NVIDIA, Primaloft, and more. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, in outlets such as IEEE Transactions. He is the also an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine.