AI Initiative seed grant awards announced

Earlier this year, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School announced the University of Maine Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Its vision is to make Maine a world-class hub for AI research, education and applications through its mission to develop transformative AI-based solutions that enhance the social and economic well-being of the citizens of Maine and beyond.

The following four projects were competitively selected to receive seed grant funding from a field of 16 projects. The teams will commence their one-year projects on Aug. 1, 2020. Plans are also in place for each of these teams to provide an update on their progress to the university community as part of the UMaine AI initiative’s webinars series.

Improved Adversarial Attack Detection Toward Robustness of Deep Neural Networks. PI: Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh (School of Information and Computer Science (SCIS)). Co-PIs: Ali Abedi (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering); Richard Corey (VEMI Lab); Nicholas Giudice (VEMI Lab); Collaborator: Theodore Nowak (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory).

Advancing Legal-Technological Approaches for Protecting Privacy Rights and Civil Liberties in the Age of Big Data. PI: Harlan Onsrud (SCIS). Co-PIs: Chaofan Chen (SCIS); Sepideh Ghanavati (SCIS); Manuel Woersdoerfer (SCIS/Maine Business School/Department of Philosophy). Collaborators: Peter Guffen (UMaine Law School/Pierce Atwood LLP) and James Campbell (Maine Freedom of Information Coalition and UMaine adjunct graduate faculty).

Interpretation of Light-Material Interactions with Machine Learning for the Detection of Shared Surface Contamination. PI: Caitlin Howell (Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering). Co-PIs: Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh (SCIS); Sheila Edalatpour (Department of Mechanical Engineering); Richard Corey (VEMI Lab).

Context-Dependent Deep Learning for Seabird Recognition in Drone Survey Imagery. PI: Roy Turner (SCIS). Co-PIs: Cynthia Loftin (U.S. Geological Survey, Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit/UMaine Department of Wildlife Ecology); Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh (SCIS). 

The entire announcement can be read here.