Four faculty members and two graduate students from the college have won a share of $575,000 funding from the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute for research projects ranging from voice-activated robotic manipulation to an early warning system that helps college students succeed.
The goal of the funded work is to accelerate research and create talent and community partnerships around data science. Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute (NMDSI) is a partnership among Northwestern Mutual, UWM and Marquette University and with a mission of establishing Wisconsin as a recognized national hub for data science and technology.
Funding was awarded to the college in two categories – the Paving ROADS Seed Fund Program and the Student Research Scholars Program.
The Paving ROADS Seed Fund Program supports new research partnerships to forge short- and long-term engagement among NMDSI affiliated faculty and data science experts across disciplines. The program also seeks to use data science for social and societal impact in Milwaukee and beyond.Funded from the college are:
- Jun Zhang,professor, electrical engineering and computer science
Zhang will develop machine learning algorithms and software that can provide automated early prediction of UWM students’ course outcomes and identify ways they can improve their performance. The overall goal is to boost student retention and on-time graduation rates.
- Mohammad Habib Rahman, associate professor, mechanical engineering, and Susan McRoy, professor, computer science
Harnessing generative artificial intelligence and voice-activated technology, this project will revolutionize robotic devices that are designed for upper limb rehabilitation, allowing users to communicate with the robot by speaking. Inga Wang, UWM associate professor, occupational therapy, and Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Marquette University professor, computer science, are also on the research team.
- Tian Zhao, associate professor, computer science
This project will focus on developing a distributed machine-learning system for educational research, where student data used for training the individual machine-learning models is privacy-protected because it is not transmitted to a central server.
The intent of the Student Research Scholars Programis to engage UWM and Marquette students in data science research, working with affiliated faculty and data science experts in and across disciplines to give them a hands-on experience. Funded projects include:
- Md Tanzil Shahria, computer science
Shahria will design a vision-based assistive robot control system that allows people with disabilities who use them to identify and locate objects, navigate the assistive robotic gripper to them, and perform pick-and-place tasks semi-autonomously rather than manually manipulating the robot. Using a depth camera to “see” the surroundings and a mapping function, he will create a deep learning-based model to detect and interact with objects.
- Raisa Nkweteyim, biomedical and health informatics
Other than cost, little is known about social factors and personal perceptions that hinder people from accessing health care. In this study, Nkweteyim will investigate patient characteristics associated with the unwillingness to access health care and perform statistical tests to confirm which characteristics are truly contributors.