University of Idaho Associate Professor of Computer Science Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma was selected by the Geological Society of America (GSA) for the M. Lee Allison Award for outstanding contributions to the field of geoinformatics and data science. Ma will receive the award and give an invited talk at the 2024 GSA Annual Meeting in September in Anaheim, …
The 2024 TickBase annual meeting took place in Burlington, VT, marking a crucial phase in the project’s final year. Researchers from participating universities gathered to share their progress and refine their work for the project’s conclusion. Presentations highlighted current research findings and sparked discussions on future collaborations, grants, and publications. The sustainability planning sessions will …
Assistant Professor Andrew Nuss recently received a $1.17M NSF CAREER Award. Nuss is a faculty member in the Department of Agriculture, Veterinary and Rangeland Sciences within the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources at University of Nevada, Reno. Nuss’s CAREER Award project aims to develop a better understanding of insect physiology and how insects …
University of Idaho graduate student Zhe Wang received first place award for the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Remote Sensing Specialty Group (RSSG) Student Illustrated Paper Competition during the AAG 2023 annual meeting in Denver. She was awarded a $300 cash prize for her research, A cross-scale transfer learning framework for deep learning-based urban mapping. …
University of Idaho graduate student Zhe Wang has been accepted into the Convergence Research (CORE) Institute Fellowship in the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego. The CORE Institute, funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator, is designed to catalyze an impact network of researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals committed to collaboratively …
Marshall Ma, associate professor of computer science, led an investigation through the Committee on Data of the International Science Council (ISC) last summer to discover the status of open data efforts across scientific unions of various disciplines. The result shows a worrying situation. Among 41 ISC member unions and associations, only 25 have sub-organizations dedicated …
Track 2 TickBase project introduced undergraduate students to the field of Geographic Information Science (GIS) and how to use it to address health disparities in underserved communities. This program was in partnership with Diné College, University of Idaho, University of Nevada, Reno, and Dartmouth College. Through an intensive two-week curriculum, the program not only trained future leaders in this …
This summer, Landon Wright, Lead Designer at Polymorphic Game Studio, attended the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) in Durham, UK with undergraduate programmer Carson Rueber. They presented their work on “ZomSim”, a proof-of-concept virtual simulation the studio is developing for the TickBase project. The simulation uses a compartment model and layers of data to illustrate how an …
Computer science doctoral student Amruta Kale was awarded the FUNding Friday Award at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) 2022 Summer Meeting at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Amruta is currently in her second year as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Idaho. Working with Professor Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma, Amruta’s work …
Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Tin Nguyen is set to begin NSF-funded research this summer that could advance our understanding of cancer. Nguyen has received a $490,039 National Science Foundation CAREER award to develop new machine learning techniques that can crunch data — molecular and biological — to determine how an individual’s cancer might …
Dartmouth undergraduate students Rena Schwartz and Joseph Earles won the first-place award of the student poster competition in the Spring 2022 Northeast Arc Users Conference (NEARC), held at Westfield State University on May 16, 2022. The title of the winning poster is “Lyme Disease and Land Cover in Massachusetts”, which is based on their research …
A review article in Computers & Geosciences from Marshall (Xiaogang) Ma in the University of Idaho Computer Science department summarizes his research and observation of knowledge graphs in geosciences over the past ten years. Concepts, studies, and best practices for applications of knowledge graphs are synthesized together into a challenge and trend analysis.
Computer Science doctoral student Amruta Kale had a paper published in Data Intelligence reviewing literature on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), identifying patterns in its recent developments, and offering a vision for future research. This paper from Kale and her collaborators at the University of Idaho and the University of Nevada, Reno is part of the …
This webinar series is geared towards researchers working on ticks and the bacterial, viral or eukaryotic pathogens they transmit. The webinars will focus on highlighting data and bioinformatic tools provided by the NIAID bioinformatic resource centers, VEuPathDB and BV-BRC. In addition, we welcome open discussion during the webinars so we can learn about your research …
Ticks are more than an inconvenience. Dangerous and potentially fatal tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease are on the rise in the United States, Canada and Europe, posing threats to anyone who works or recreates outdoors. A research collaboration led by Monika Gulia-Nuss, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University …
University of Nevada, Reno team members Molly McVicar, Isabella Rivera, Jeremiah Reyes, and Monika Gulia-Nuss have published a review paper in the MDPI journal Pathogens. Lyme disease, the most important vector-borne disease in the United States, is increasing in incidence and geographic range. In the Pacific west, the western black-legged tick, Ixodes pacificus is an important vector …
A multidisciplinary team based at the University of Idaho received two supplemental grants totaling $600,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to expand their work on tick-borne diseases. Their current NSF EPSCoR Track 2 program, TickBase, leverages big data to tackle the impacts of climate change on tick-borne diseases. The new grants will enable the …
Barrie Robison, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho, co-founded Polymorphic Games to incorporate evolutionary and ecological principles into video games. When his colleagues wanted to understand the growth of tickborne diseases, they recruited Robison and his studio to translate the research into a video game, aimed to serve as a …
Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Tin Nguyen and his lab at the University of Nevada, Reno have developed software to help life scientists efficiently analyze single-cell data using machine learning.
Idaho Fish and Game partnered with University of Idaho researchers to conduct a multi-year study on why moose populations are declining. So far, they have found that the majority of deaths are due to parasite diseases. The main culprit? Winter ticks.
GeoWeaver is a new NASA ACCESS project, led by Drs. Ziheng Sun, Marshall Ma, Annie Burgess, and Daniel Tong. This platform will improve the ability of machine learning algorithms to process large datasets. Outputs from GeoWeaver will provide new computation facilities for the TickBase project, while TickBase will simultaneously improve the usability of GeoWeaver.
University of Idaho researchers are leading a nearly $6 million National Science Foundation cooperative agreement, using large and complex data sets to improve prediction and response measures for tick-borne diseases.