News

MSI PI George Karypis (professor, Computer Science and Engineering) received the Distinguished Contributions Award during the 2021 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD). The PAKDD is one of the longest-established and leading conferences in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery. The award recognizes Professor Karypis’s outstanding contributions to those fields.

MSI PI Paul Dauenhauer (professor, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science) has been named a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. This prestigious award is the largest unrestricted prize for early-career scientists and engineers. Professor Dauenhauer is one of only 31 finalists nationwide this year. The final awards will be announced in July.

MSI has joined the iRODS Consortium, an international membership-based foundation that leads the development and support of the open-source integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). iRODS is free data-management software for data virtualization, data discovery, workflow automation, and secure collaboration. MSI plans to use it for the new HIPAA-compliant Blackwell cluster, which will enter production later in 2021. It will also be used to help users manage and share data in second-tier storage.

A new study by MSI PIs Jason Hill (professor, Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering) and Stephen Polasky (professor, Applied Economics) and their colleagues describes research showing how agricultural activities contribute to air pollution in the form of fine particulate matter. The study showed that animal production is responsible for 80% of this pollution and discusses how this could be reduced.

An interdisciplinary team of University of Minnesota researchers has developed a website where bicyclists in Minnesota can locate public restrooms and portable toilets. The website, MN Bike and Go, went live in April 2021. The site also allows bicyclists to add additional sites to the map, and to report the facilities’ hours of being open and rate its conditions on a short survey.

A new study co-authored by MSI PI Jason Hill (professor, Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering) shows that people of color are disproportionately affected by particulate matter in the atmosphere. This held true even when controlling for which state people lived in, whether they lived in urban or rural areas, and income level.

On Wednesday, May 5, 2021, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Mangi will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on May 5. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on May 5 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. Systems status is always available on our Status page.

MSI PIs John Bischof (professor, Mechanical Engineering; Director, Institute for Engineering in Medicine) and Erik Finger (associate professor, Surgery) will lead the newly established Organ and Tissue Preservation Center at the University of Minnesota.

MSI PI Kristin Hogquist (professor, Laboratory Medicine and Pathology) has been named a 2021 Distinguished Fellow by the American Association of Immunologists (AAI). This award, given to only 16 people for 2021, recognizes outstanding leadership in the field of immunology and excellence in research. An article about this award appears on the Medical School news site: Dr.