UI3 officially ended December 31, 2019. For more information, visit the farewell letter from UI3 Director Gregory Carmichael.

Many thanks to all who followed UI3 activities!

Omar Chowdhury, asst. professor in the Department of Computer Science, won a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an advanced-technology division of the U.S. Department of Defense. Chowdhury's research identifies security and privacy weaknesses of existing and emerging cellular network systems.

An early iteration of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Informatics (aka IGPI) began at the University of Iowa 19 years ago, but the number of student participants increased 70 percent since 2015 under Iowa Informatics Initiative (UI3) administration. In the past academic year, 40 master’s and PhD IGPI students were enrolled, compared to 28 in 2015.

Iowa's new Interactive Data Analytics Service (IDAS) especially appeals to those who may not have used HPC in the past, but whose data-intensive research would benefit from advanced computational capabilities. Such disciplines are often referred to as, “the long tail of science,” and many have begun to engage with AI methodologies which make their work more computationally-intensive than ever.

“Our system connects 100,000 wells and analyzes all the combinations in the well in the area you selected, and that will give you an estimate of the geology of the aquifer levels and depth of the aquifer,” said Ibrahim Demir, a UI assistant professor of civil/environmental engineering and a researcher at the environmental-contamination center.

When University of Iowa officials notified the campus that the water system had exceeded the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Standard of 80 parts per billion total trihalomethanes, UI graduate student Robyn Williams began work on a data-intensive project to initiate change in Iowa’s water quality.

"The project is led by Jun Wang, chemical and biochemical engineering professor and assistant director for the Center for Computer-Aided Design in the UI’s College of Engineering. As part of the UI3, Wang worked with UI Information Technology Services and Protostudios in Iowa City to develop the proposal."

Michael J. Schnieders’ team uses computational accelerators to discover solutions to health problems associated with an aging population. “It once took a year on 20 compute nodes to optimize all of the protein structures in the Deafness Variation Database for analysis of specific phenome-genome combinations that led to hereditary hearing loss; now it's accomplished in one week using 10 Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs,” he said.

“Ethics, legal and safety considerations will govern the progress of autonomous transportation,” said UI's Daniel McGehee who predicts that full automation is decades away from ubiquity. “By 2040, ~ 90 percent of cars on the road will have today’s production advanced driver assistance system technology. It is hard to predict when fully autonomous cars will be able to operate in all conditions,” he added.

UI Health Informatics PhD Student Eric Pahl is driven to develop smarter tech to improve access, affordability and quality of organ replacement therapies. With Dalton Shaull, he co-founded OmniLife, Inc.; they developed an app that halves the time necessary to arrange transplants.

Michael Abràmoff (CCOM) developed the first fully-autonomous diagnostic AI system to be cleared by the FDA; clinical trials were approved in 2018 for IDx-DR, a fully-autonomous AI system for the early detection of diabetic retinopathy.