We are excited to announce the recipients of the $500 (10,000 c1 core hours) Academic Research Program Grant. While we had originally planned to award only two grants, we were pleasantly surprised by the level of interest our program received from highly-qualified individuals. In response, we decided to award nine grants!
We’ve included a list of recipients below so you can see some of the great work that will be benefiting from our platform.
If you missed out on our first cycle of grants, don’t sweat! We plan on having a second cycle in the near future.
List of Recipients
Chris Beaumont
PhD candidate at the Institute for Astronomy
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Developing an automated technique to search astrophysical images for “bubbles” blown by massive young stars. This will help astronomers handle their rapidly growing datasets, which we currently examine by eye when looking for morphologically complex objects.
Damian Borth
PhD candidate
University of Kaiserslautern
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Video concept detection using web-based training sources like YouTube. I particularly focus my interest on developing learning approaches which adopt to weak labels and deal with the domain change problem.
Liang Yuxian Eugene
Research Assistant
National Cheng Chi University
Modeling the Lifecycle of Natural Disasters.
Patrick Henaff
Associate Professor of Finance
Institut d’Administration des Entreprises, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
Motivated by the current financial crisis, my research focus is to understand and measure model risk in computational finance, ie. the risk associated with the use of an inappropriate model to price and manage financial derivatives. Inspired by other scientific disciplines, in particular computational biology, this research project will also experiment with a new type of scientific production, based on the publication and peer review of of self-contained, reproducible experimental protocols, as opposed to summary results.
Roy Keyes
Phd candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of New Mexico
Developing faster, more accurate methods of calculating radiation dose to improve cancer treatment along with associated research tools.
Meredith Lehmann
La Jolla High School
SARS and the swine flu rekindled interest in the spread of epidemics and a large literature appeared to conclusively prove the intuitive proposition that modern epidemics spread disproportionately through large hub airports near large population centers. My research challenges the conventional wisdom using a different model of the US transportation network. A different picture of epidemic propagation in the continental US emerges from this analysis. Primarily auto, not air, travel seeds counties with a modest number of infecteds and the subsequent explosion at the county level dominates further seeding by infected travelers. No preferred epidemic pathways arise in my simulated world and may not be present in the real world either.
Eric Lofgren
PhD candidate in the Department of Epidemiology, Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The mathematical modeling and simulation of the transmission of Clostridium difficile in healthcare settings.
Ariel Rokem
Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Psychology under Professor Brian Wandell
Stanford University
Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to measure physiological and anatomical properties of the human visual system. In particular, trying to understand the biological underpinnings of differences in perception between the center of the visual field and the periphery.
Thomas Wiecki
PhD candidate under Professor Michael J. Frank
Brown University
My research aims at elucidating the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms underlying decision making in the healthy and diseased brain. Towards this goal I am simulating parts of the intact brain in the computer and model how different brain lesions and psychiatric diseases influence brain activity and behavior. Ultimately, this research will help in developing better diagnosis and treatment options for brain disorders such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.