Recently, there have been multiple failures of large tailings dams that store mining wastes, around the world, with devastating impacts (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster). These dams are unique in that they continue to be raised as waste piles up and can get as tall as 400m. The risk and impact of failure increases as the dam gets taller. There are several thousand such dams around the world. The concept of the project is to develop a continuous status monitoring and risk analysis of these dams, automatically, using globally available satellite data from multiple bands, as well as regularly updated climate data products. Overtopping of the dam during an intense or persistent rainfall event is the leading mode of failure. Foundation failure which leads to a liquefaction or deformation of the dam is the second leading failure mode.

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The microbiome comprises a heterogeneous mix of bacterial strains, many with strong association to human diseases. Recent work has shown that even the same bacteria could have differences in their genomes across multiple individuals. Such differences, termed structural variations, are strongly associated with host disease risk factors [1]. However, methods for their systematic extraction and profiling are currently lacking. This project aims to make cross-sample analysis of structural variants from hundreds of individual microbiomes feasible by efficient representation of metagenomic data. The colored De-Bruijn graph (cDBG) data structure is a natural choice for this representation [2]. However, current cDBG implementations are either fast at the cost of a large space, or highly space efficient but either slow or lacking valuable practical features.

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Our lab develops an open-source text mining software called NimbleMiner (http://github.com/mtopaz/NimbleMiner). We will work on improving the software using the latest machine learning techniques.

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Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) has received increasing attention with the development of autonomous driving technology. It is believed that multi-vehicular and multi-informative algorithm is the direction of the autonomous driving technology. However, the stability and liability of the communication prevents the future from extensively embracing V2V-based transportation. Rigorous test is required before V2V can actually hit the road. Compared with the costly field test, simulation tests are more economical and feasible. To simulate the V2V communication and evaluate the robustness of current V2V-based algorithm, we are therefore developing a simulation platform integrating different commercial software like SUMO, Veins and OMNET++. These software simulate on the actual New York map, and simulate the vehicular communication in different scenarios and platoon configurations. Our next step is to use this platform to test our own V2V-based algorithms. The output of this research will eventually provide an open platform which would automatically evaluate personally designed algorithm with least manual work.

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Galaxies in our universe form hierarchically, continuously merging and absorbing smaller galaxies over cosmic time. In this project we aim to identify the most important features of, as well as generate efficient new features from, the merger histories of galaxies. Namely, features that predict (or physically speaking, determine) the properties of galaxies, e.g. their shape or color. This will be done using the results from a large cosmological simulation, IllustrisTNG (www.tng-project.org). We will begin with identifying ways to represent the rich information in the merger history. We will then compare various ML methods oriented towards feature selection or importance analysis: random forests or gradient boosted trees, L1SVM, neural networks (through analysis of e.g. saliency maps). More advanced models can also be applied, such as neural network models designed for feature selection. Finally, we wish to apply / develop methods that can build ‘interpretable’ new features by constructing them as algebraic formulas from original input features (inspired by e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5923/81). The overarching goal is to understand better what in the merger history is most crucial in determining a galaxy’s present-day properties, an answer to which can be widely applicable to problems in galaxy formation.

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Locally advanced colorectal cancers that invade adjacent organs (i.e., T4 primary tumors) without evidence of distant metastasis account for approximately 5-15% of new colorectal cancers. There are limited multi-institutional study describing the perioperative complication rates and long-term survival of patients undergoing single organ resection after neoadjuvant chemotherapy and/or radiation versus multivisceral resections for patients with T4 colorectal cancers. Using the American College of Surgeons National Cancer Database (NCDB), we seek to analyze differential outcomes (perioperative complications and overall survival) by procedure performed, tumor details, pathological findings, chemo-radiotherapy regimens, patient demographics.

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This project works with a novel corpus of text-based school data to develop a multi-dimensional measure of the degree to which American colleges and universities offer a liberal arts education. We seek a data scientist for various tasks on a project that uses analysis of multiple text corpora to better understand the liberal arts. This is an ongoing three-year project with opportunities for future collaborations, academic publications, and developing and improving existing data science and machine learning skills. Tasks likely include: (1) Using Amazon Web Services to create and maintain cloud-based storage (SQL, S3 buckets) of the project’s expanding library of data. (2) Extracting information (named entities, times, places, books, and so on) from millions of plain-text syllabus records. (3) Merging multiple forms of data into a single dataset. (4) Scraping websites for relevant information (e.g., college course offerings, school rankings). Some pages may include dynamically created content that requires the use of a program such as Selenium.

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