Three faculty earn MIDAS grants to broaden the frontiers of data science

Three of fifteen projects funded through 2019 U-M Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grants by the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) are co-led by CSE faculty. The grants fund 15 interdisciplinary teams, chosen from 65 proposals, with data science as a common thread.

This round of funding strongly encourages pioneering work based on innovative concepts that promises high reward, major impact, promotion of public interest, and potential for major expansion, the Institute said in a press release.

“We are funding not one, but two projects from the School for Environment and Sustainability. And for the first time we are funding researchers from Physics, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and many other departments,” says Dr. H. V. Jagadish, MIDAS Director, “This is exactly what MIDAS would like to accomplish, to catalyze the transformative use of Data Science in a wide range of disciplines to achieve lasting societal impact.”

From CSE, Profs. David Fouhey, Barzan Mozafari, and Atul Prakash were selected for grants with collaborative partners in three different departments:

• “Fusing Physics and Deep Learning for Solar Dynamics Forecasting” Fouhey and Ward Manchester (Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering)
• “Database Learning: A Query Engine That Becomes Smarter Over Time” Mozafari and Reza Soroushmehr (Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics)
• “Achieving ML Robustness by Leveraging Physics-based Constraints” Prakash and Huei Peng (Mechanical Engineering)