Associate Professor of Computer & Information Science Ming Shao was recently awarded a $512,105 cyber-physical systems (CPS) grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project titled AI-Boosted Precision Medicine through Continual in situ Monitoring of Microtissue Behaviors on Organs-on-Chips, in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Inc. Shao is the primary investigator and UMass Dartmouth is the lead institute.

“The goal of this project is to develop an engineered cyber-physical system that combines advanced biological models with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence methods for predictive, automated screening of anti-cancer drugs and optimizations of their dosing,” says Shao.

“This will move science towards realizing the long-desired precision medicine paradigm leading to significant social impacts. The project will provide opportunities to promote STEM education for K-12 students, especially those from under-represented groups, and disseminate science and engineering knowledge to the public.”

This grant, which combines with Brigham and Women’s share to total $1.1 million, will support Shao and his research team’s development of accurate, data-driven predictive learning models and joint Bayes’ models to enable a “multi-sensor-integrated multi-organ-on-a-chip" platform. This is Shao’s second NSF grant in two months, also being awarded a CAREER award for the project, Enabling Continual Multi-view Representation Learning: An Adversarial Perspective in July.

“These awards witness the growing footprint of UMass Dartmouth in research in the recent years, and particularly in AI, data science, and cybersecurity. I am excited to launch these new projects, and work closely with my students and collaborators from the Greater Boston and SouthCoast areas,” says Shao.

Dr. Shao was appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at UMass Dartmouth in 2016. Since joining UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Shao has secured funding from several sources for $3.17M, including NSF, ONR, NOAA, Mass.gov, Adobe, NVIDIA, Primaloft, and more. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, in outlets such as IEEE Transactions. He is the also an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. 

"These awards witness the growing footprint of UMass Dartmouth in research in the recent years, and particularly in AI, data science, and cybersecurity. I am excited to launch these new projects, and work closely with my students and collaborators from the Greater Boston and SouthCoast areas."