houck2040/research_news huggingface dataset:
On Oct. 1, 2021, researchers from Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) will begin collaborating on a prototype for what they call the Accelerating Computing for Emerging Sciences (ACES) system.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide $5 million for ACES’s development and an additional $1 million per year over five years to pay for system operation and support.
Texas A&M Interim Vice President for Research Jack Baldaulf expressed gratitude to the NSF for its substantial investment in the ACES project. “We are thankful to NSF for the opportunity to lead such an important initiative and to our Texas A&M HPRC staff and collaborators at UT Austin and UIUC for making this a successful effort,” Baldauf said. “Computational science is critical to our national needs and the ACES platform will not only advance research but also help educate the future workforce in this area.”
The team’s goal is to develop an all-inclusive system that will serve researchers across a wide range of scholarly disciplines and computer skills, according to Honggao Liu, executive director of Texas A&M’s High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) and the project’s principal investigator.
These disciplines include artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, health population informatics, genomics and bioinformatics, human and agricultural life sciences, oil-and-gas simulations, new-materials design, climate modeling, molecular dynamics, quantum-computing architectures, imaging, smart and connected societies, geosciences and quantum chemistry.
“The ACES system will support the national research community through coordination systems supported by the NSF,” Liu said. “In this way, the ACES system will provide invaluable support to cutting-edge projects across a broad spectrum of research disciplines in the nation. ACES will also leverage HPRC’s efforts that promote science and broaden participation in computing at the K-12, collegiate and professional levels to have a transformative impact nationally by focusing on training, education and outreach.”
Researchers should think of ACES as a cyber-buffet, said Timothy M. Cockerill, director of user services, TACC at UT Austin, and a co-principal investigator on the ACES project. “They’ll be able to essentially build the custom environment they require on a per job basis and not be constrained to the contents of a physical server node,” Cockerill said.
ACES will open new avenues to scientific advancement, said Shaowen Wang, head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, professor at UIUC and a co-principal investigator on the ACES project. “Exciting advances on many science frontiers will become possible by harnessing the hybrid computing resources and highly adaptable framework offered by ACES to enable increasingly complex scientific workflows driven by geospatial big data and artificial intelligence,” Wang said.
Also serving as co-principal investigators are Lisa M. Perez, associate director for advanced computing enablement, and Dhruva Chakravorty, associate director for user services and research, both from HPRC at Texas A&M.
Research that generates breakthrough discoveries will require highly advanced computer designs that can meet the challenge, Texas A&M Senior Associate Vice President for Research Costas N. Georghiades said. “With the increasing complexity of computational problems in the big-data era we live in, it is no longer sufficient to use traditional supercomputers which rely only on optimizing the software,” Georghiades said. “The ACES system will also be able to adapt hardware resources on the fly to tackle complex computational tasks more efficiently. Texas A&M is proud to lead this effort in collaboration with our university partners at UT Austin and Illinois.”
The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) awarded five grants totaling $5.7 million to Texas A&M University, the Division of Research announced today. The grants are among 73 new statewide awards totaling more than $142 million that CPRIT recently announced in Austin.
“Since Texas voters agreed in 2007 and 2019 to invest billions of dollars to fight cancer, CPRIT has consistently delivered on its mission to fund ground-breaking cancer research across the state,” Jack Baldauf, interim vice president for research, said. “With this year’s grants, CPRIT continues to demonstrate that the Texas A&M research community is playing a vital role in the state’s commitment to cancer research, treatment and prevention.”
The largest of the five grants, a $3.9 million Core Facility Support Award, went to Clifford Stephan, research associate professor, Center for Translational Cancer Research, and co-director, High Throughput Research and Screening Center, Institute of Biosciences and Technology, Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health), to fund a project titled, “The GCC Microphysiological Lead Optimization and Toxicity Screening Facility.” CPRIT bolsters cancer research by providing financical support for programs like Core Facility Support Awards—developing facilities that provide services to support and enhance cancer research projects.
CPRIT awarded a $1 million Prevention Grant to Jason McKnight, clinical assistant professor, Department of Primary Care and Population Health, and director, Residency Recruitment-Texas A&M Family Medicine Residency Program, College of Medicine, and a researcher with Texas A&M Health, to support a project titled, “Increasing Accessibility to Smoking Cessation and Lung Cancer Screening Services for Low-Income/Uninsured Texans.” Ten percent of CPRIT funds support the delivery of evidence-based cancer prevention interventions to underserved populations in Texas.
In addition, CPRIT presented High Impact High Risk Awards of $250,000 each—short-term funding to explore the feasibility of high-risk projects that could potentially contribute major new insights into the etiology, diagnosis, treatment or prevention of cancers.
In what organizers believe is a first-of-its-kind camp, High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) at Texas A&M University recently introduced middle and high school students to data science and cybertechnologies through a hybrid of virtual and in-person learning environments. HPRC’s Camp Smart encouraged students to take a holistic approach to data and computing science.
“Texas A&M HPRC is constantly experimenting and offering new ways for Texas A&M researchers to work with computing and data,” Honggao Liu, executive director of HPRC said. “We are excited to engage with the community and help shape the future of the country.”
During June-July 2021, more than 150 students from the United States and other nations attended four camps offered through HPRC’s Summer Computing Academy. The academy returned after a year-long hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Participants at Camp Smart and its counterpart—Camp Secure, a cybersecurity-and-coding camp—worked with artificial intelligence, machine learning and other data science techniques, combined with cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure methods. Additionally, the summer academy offered two virtual camps that focused on building concepts in cybersecurity.
Texas A&M undergraduate and graduate students participated as counselors and were involved in hands-on activities, educational games, lectures from faculty, tours of campus facilities and a session dedicated to college admissions. Returning campers participated as junior counselors.
The camps culminated with a contest in which campers developed innovative solutions to address today’s societal problems.
Program alumni have gone on to participate in STEM and computing programs at the undergraduate level, including at Texas A&M.
Partners for the program include the Department of Computer Science Engineering, the Department of Education & Human Resource Development, University Libraries, the Texas Engineering Experiment Station and the Division of Information Technology.
The program received support from the Texas Workforce Commission, the National Science Foundation (NSF), GenCyber (a program funded by NSF and the National Security Agency), Dell EMC, Amazon Web Services and Summus Industries.
Camp instructional materials are available for community use. For online access, please send an email to help@hprc.tamu.edu.
Texas A&M University has created an Undergraduate Certificate in Data Analytics for the Petroleum Industry (CERT-DAPI), supported by a $1 million gift from ConocoPhillips, the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS) announced today.
The five-year gift is part of ConocoPhillips’ commitment to help meet the growing demand for data science coursework in universities.
The certificate program will admit its first students during the 2021-22 fall semester. The program resulted from a collaboration between Texas A&M’s colleges of engineering, science, geosciences and Mays Business School. TAMIDS and the Department of Petroleum Engineering in the College of Engineering are managing the program.
The program is organized following the Curricular Paths framework developed by TAMIDS, which builds on students’ varied disciplinary preparation, culminating in interdisciplinary team projects in a practicum that was developed for the program. “Curricular Paths draws on practices from industry where researchers with varied disciplinary groundings acquire knowledge outside their fields to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams,” said Nick Duffield, TAMIDS director and holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, College of Engineering.
Texas A&M faculty members who contribute to the development and operation of the program will receive recognition as ConocoPhillips Data Science Faculty Fellows. Four will receive the awards for their work in 2021 for creating or redeveloping courses in the program.
The 2021 fellows are:
In addition, the gift will provide funding for:
“We are honored to help advance data science education at Texas A&M and proud to equip the next generation with the vital data science skills necessary for solving critical challenges in our industry,” said ConocoPhillips Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Technical Functions Michael Hatfield. “Data analytics is spreading to every part of our company, resulting in better and faster decisions, so it’s important to prepare students with enhanced data science experience.”
In addition to this data science contribution, ConocoPhillips supports Texas A&M by funding scholarships, programs, faculty and facilities as part of the company’s ongoing investment in education and job readiness.
Stratos Pistikopoulos, director of the Texas A&M Energy Institute and holder of the Dow Chemical Chair in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, will receive AIChE’s Sustainable Engineering Forum Research Award—an annual award presented for basic or applied research results relative to the sustainability of products, processes or the environment. This award recognizes significant technical contributions to research and development activities.
“Engineers like Stratos Pistikopoulos are in the forefront of advancing and implementing a wide variety of clean, renewable energy systems that will serve, not only the present generation, but generations of the future,” said Texas A&M Interim Vice President for Research Jack Baldauf. “We are fortunate to have a researcher with his experience, expertise and accomplishments leading our Energy Institute at Texas A&M.”
Pistikopoulos is also course director of the Master of Science in Energy program, the director of the Data Sciences Core of the Texas A&M Superfund Research Center and a principal investigator at the RAPID Institute on intensified process fundamentals, co-leading the modeling and simulation focus area. Before joining Texas A&M, he was a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London and director of its Centre for Process Systems Engineering. He earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Pistikopoulos has authored or co-authored over 550 major research publications in the areas of modeling, control and optimization of process, energy and systems engineering applications, 16 books, 33 book chapters and four patents. He is a co-recipient of the prestigious MacRobert Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering, received the Sargent Medal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), United Kingdom (U.K.), and a recipient of the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award of CAST/AIChE. Pistikopoulos is an elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the U.K., a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), and of the IChemE, and is a member of The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). He also holds the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University Politehnica of Buharest, Romania and the University of Pannonia, Hungary.
Founded in 1908, the AIChE is a nonprofit organization providing leadership to the chemical engineering profession. It is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals with more than 60,000 members in industry, academia and government from more than 110 countries. The Sustainable Engineering Forum seeks collaborative work in programming and education objectives with other professional societies, both domestic and international. Specific focus areas of the forum include: using appropriate metrics for sustainability; developing approaches for designing products and processes that can be optimized to desired metrics criteria and that incorporate environmental and societal benefit factors and assessing impacts of resource use (energy, material and cost) on environmental and societal benefits of products, processes and services.
The Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS) has presented grants to 18 Texas A&M faculty members representing the colleges of architecture, engineering, geosciences, liberal arts, medicine, science and University Libraries, the Division of Research announced today.
“TAMIDS aims to help faculty strengthen data science in their own departments and foster their leadership of TAMIDS activities. The two TAMIDS programs announced here will sponsor the development of new interdisciplinary courses in data science and support junior faculty in leading workshops, hackathons and K12 outreach that will engage new groups of students with data science,” said Nick Duffield, director of TAMIDS and holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, College of Engineering.
Ten faculty members shared seven awards from the TAMIDS Data Science Course Development Program, offered in association with the Texas A&M Center for Teaching Excellence. The program supports the creation of new courses in data science. Each awardee received $10,000 at the start of the project with an additional $5,000 upon completion.
Associate Professor Ann McNamara in the Department of Visualization, College of Architecture, said the award will allow her team to stay on the leading edge of research in analytics and data visualization.
“Our new course development award from TAMIDS will support our development of a cross-listed course on data analytics and visualization,” McNamara said. “Of course, analytics and visualization are key to the advancement of data science education. However, our novel approach intertwining aesthetics, statistics and computational influences will advance data science education.  First, it will expose our students to the symbiotic relationships between statistics, computer science and visualization when it comes to data science. Secondly, by taking an interdisciplinary approach we will engage students in the creative and collaborative process necessary for effective data science, particularly analytics and visualization.”
McNamara shared her award with Derya Akleman, instructional associate professor, Department of Statistics, College of Science, and John Keyser, professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, College of Engineering.
In addition, the following faculty members received awards through the TAMIDS Data Science Course Development Program:
TAMIDS also presented eight faculty members with fellowships from its Career Initiation Fellow Program, which provides early career support to faculty working in any area involving data science and encourages them to propose engagements with TAMIDS activities, programs or a broader mission. Each fellow receives a $10,000 research grant.
Manoranjan Majji, assistant professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, said the fellowship has already made an impact on his research. “I am organizing a special tutorial session on data-driven modeling applications for dynamical systems and control at the prestigious 2021 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control,” he said. “The fellowship has also enabled me to ask and answer fundamental questions in my field. I look forward to hosting a workshop next summer and also teaching impactful cross disciplinary courses that eventually foster greater research opportunities at TAMIDS.”
Na Zou, assistant professor, Department of Engineering Technology & Industrial Distribution, College of Engineering, said her TAMIDS fellowship will support the development of fairness-aware machine learning that will address intentional and unintentional discrimination in the algorithms.  “We propose to systematically investigate and facilitate fairness by leveraging the interpretability of key elements in a machine learning life-cycle, including data preparation, feature representation, modeling and prediction,” she said.
In addition, TAMIDS Career Initiation Fellowships for 2021 went to the following faculty members:
Round 4 of Texas A&M University’s X-Grants program has selected eight interdisciplinary research projects to share $7 million in funding, the Division of Research announced today. The program is an initiative of the 10-year, $100 million President’s Excellence Fund.
The funded projects represent 73 A&M faculty members and researchers from 13 colleges and schools — Agriculture & Life Sciences, Architecture, Business, Education & Human Development, Engineering, Law, Liberal Arts, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health, Science, and Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, plus the Global Health Research Complex, Texas A&M AgriLife Research and University Libraries.
Interim Vice President for Research Jack G. Baldauf said the X-Grants program is designed to foster forward-thinking research that establishes collaborations across the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines.
“Interdisciplinary research is often the source of the world’s most significant breakthroughs,” Baldauf said. “This year’s X-Grants projects offer the potential for life-enhancing advancements in pandemic response, cultural heritage, pediatric care, psychological treatment, vaccine development and more. Congratulations to the research teams that submitted these inspiring proposals.”
Titles and team leaders for each of the eight projects are:
“Mapping and Meeting the Directed Evolution of a Pandemic,” Benjamin Neuman, professor, Department of Biology, College of Science
“MitoX: Targeting Mitochondria to Improve Human Health,” Weston Porter, professor, Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences
“Design and Delivery of Personalized, AI-assisted, Accessible, Positive-affect Treatments for Depression,” Annmarie MacNamara, assistant professor, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, College of Liberal Arts
“Effective Real-world Telemonitoring of Chronic Disease for the Underserved,” Mark Lawley, professor, Wm Michael Barnes ’64 Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, College of Engineering
“A Multidisciplinary Platform to Develop Thermally Stable and Highly Efficient mRNA Vaccines,” Qing Sun, assistant professor, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering.
“Understanding the Impact of Expansion of Health Insurance Coverage in Texas on Financial Well-being,” Benjamin Ukert, assistant professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health
“The Gulf Coast Heritage Preparedness Initiative,” Andrea Roberts, assistant professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, College of Architecture
“Saving Babies Born with Birth Defects: Crafting Epigenetic Risk Scores to Reduce Racial Disparity in Mortality,” Theresa Morris, professor, Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts
A total of 224 one-page proposals were submitted for Round 4, 78 of which were chosen for preliminary proposals. Twenty-eight were selected to submit final proposals. After oral presentations and reviews by three reviewers each, a panel met and chose the eight proposals for funding.
Texas A&M University has named 10 faculty members as Arts & Humanities Fellows for 2021, the Division of Research announced today. Each new fellow will receive a three-year grant of $15,000 to support their outstanding scholarship.
Since 2015, the Arts & Humanities Fellowship Program has provided funding to 50 Texas A&M faculty members, including the 10 newest fellows.
Through this program, Texas A&M acknowledges the essential contributions of the arts and humanities to the development and advancement of civilization, Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said.
“Our Arts & Humanities Fellowships encourage our scholars and artists to pursue excellence in their fields,” Barteau said. “The arts and humanities are vital to shaping our understanding of our world and to preparing the leaders of the future. This year’s fellows have proposed groundbreaking projects in anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, Hispanic studies, communications, feminist studies, literature, architecture and political science. I look forward to the new learning that will come from their work.”
Application to the program is open to all Texas A&M faculty engaged in scholarship in the humanities or in creative work in the arts.
For 2021, the program received 42 applications, according to Gerianne Alexander, associate vice president for research and director of the program. “Once again, we were pleased to receive applications of high quality,” Alexander said. “We encourage all eligible faculty to develop proposals for next year’s fellowships.”
Each spring, Arts & Humanities fellows are chosen by a peer-review committee from project-based applications. Selections are based on merit and originality, professional qualifications, clarity, benefit to the public and the quality of the overall proposal.
Arts & Humanities Fellowships for 2021 were awarded to the following faculty members:
Daniel R. Bare, assistant professor, Religious Studies Program, will produce a book-length study of the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville—from the Jim Crow era, through the civil rights movement and into the late twentieth century.
Deborah Carlson, associate professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts, will create an illustrated multilingual lexicon of nautical terminology in a searchable, open-access digital database, stretching from the Greek Archaic to the Early Modern period, integrating literary descriptions of water craft with the physical remains of ships and boats.
Daniel Conway, professor, Department of Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and a 2016 Arts & Humanities Fellow, will compose a book designed for teachers and scholars working in genocide studies, exploring the relevance of popular films in science fiction.
Sara DiCaglio, assistant professor, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, will write a monograph illustrating how pregnancy is largely absent from rhetoric about reproduction. The project examines this rhetoric in public health communication, cultural models of pregnancy and scientific studies.