News

MSI PIs Sang-Hyun Oh (professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Peter Larsen (assistant professor, Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences) and their colleagues have developed a new diagnostic technique that can be used to detect neurodegenerative diseases more quickly and accurately.

The U of M will lead a $2M NSF grant developing a system to study AI-powered news recommender systems. The grant is part of the NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Community Research Infrastructure program. The project will develop a shared news recommender system that will allow researchers to carry out research into users of AI recommender systems.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2023, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. MSI’s storage, compute clusters, and front-end servers will be unavailable for some portion of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on May 3. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on May 3 held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. Projects that utilize Stratus VMs will lose connectivity to those VMs for approximately one hour at some point during this maintenance period.

MSI PI Fang Li (professor, Pharmacology; co-Principal Investigator, Midwest Antiviral Drug Discovery Center) has been named a Healthcare Hero by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

In research published in February 2023, MSI PI Jian-Ping Wang (professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering) and colleagues at the U of M and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have created a new process for making spintronic devices. These devices are critical to the manufacture of semiconductor chips, which are necessary for consumer goods, including smartphones, cars, computers, and many other electronics.

Rare Disease Day was observed on February 28 in the medical community. The purpose of the day is to generate discussion about rare diseases, the people affected by them, and healthcare systems that treat them.

MSI PI Vipin Kumar (Regents Professor, Computer Science and Engineering; Institute for Engineering in Medicine) is one of the 2023 Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The AAAI is a society that advances and promotes research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence.

In a story about the discipline of academic medicine, the U of M Medical School’s monthly feature “Where Discovery Creates Hope” describes the work of MSI PI Melena Bellin (professor, Pediatrics). Academic medicine combines both research and teaching. Professor Bellin uses MSI resources for research into islet transplantation as a treatment for diabetes.

Two MSI PIs have been named Distinguished McKnight University Professors. This program recognizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status. The MSI PIs on the list are: