Since 2008, the Innovation Fund has promoted research into AI fairness, sustainable agriculture, drug discovery, and more.

As an assistant professor just starting her research program six years ago, Olga Russakovsky was passionate about improving computers’ ability to identify objects and actions in photos and videos. At the same time, she was concerned that the visual data sets used to train AI systems were rife with racial, gender, geographic and other biases, and that artificial intelligence (AI) was expanding its role in human decision-making.

In 2018, Russakovsky, now an associate professor of computer science, received an Innovation Research Grant from the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). The funding enabled Russakovsky and her team, along with fellow computer science professor Arvind Narayanan, to develop open-source tools to uncover bias in visual data sets and techniques to mitigate bias while training AI models.

The Princeton Engineering Innovation Research Grants began in 2008 with Project X, which Lynn Szostak founded in memory of her husband, David Gardner, who graduated from Princeton in 1969. Since then, more than a dozen alumni, parents, and other donors have established additional innovation funds, some with a specific focus on machine learning, health, or the environment. To date, the program has funded more than $26 million in more than 200 research projects.

These grants support faculty in the School of Engineering to push the boundaries of their disciplines and pursue new ideas that involve collaboration with researchers in other disciplines. With a spirit of creativity, trial and error, and risk-taking, these innovation grants fill funding gaps in promising but unproven areas of research.

Olga Russakovsky, co-director of Princeton University's AI4ALL summer program, speaks to participants who help low-income high school students learn the fundamentals of programming and AI and collaborate on research projects. Photo by Tori Lepp/Fotobuddy

“The innovation grant from the Yang Family Foundation played a key role in launching research on AI fairness in my lab,” said Russakovsky, who built on his initial success by receiving a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2022. Russakovsky has also received several awards in recognition of his contributions to research, teaching and outreach.

Angelina Wang, who graduated from her doctoral program in Russakovsky's group this year, has become a leader in the field of AI fairness, Russakovsky said. Much of her doctoral research was enabled and shaped by that initial support, she said, and Wang plans to continue her research as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and take up a professorship at Cornell Tech.

The Innovation Grants are open to faculty at any stage in their careers, but Antoine Kahn, associate dean of the School of Engineering, noted that the grants are especially valuable to junior faculty. The grants have helped many junior faculty get their start. They give them confidence and allow them to start projects that are a bit riskier and might not be able to get outside funding, said Kahn, who manages the Innovation Grants program. Like Russakovsky, many of the grant recipients have used the money to establish their research areas and then secured larger grants from the federal government.

The program also places a special focus on teams of two or three researchers, often from different departments and sometimes outside SEAS, which has allowed SEAS to collaborate with fields such as neuroscience, psychology and the humanities, said Khan, the Stephen C. McAleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science.

This year’s 22 awards, totaling more than $3 million, include:

Adi Foundation for Excellence in Engineering

The Addy Fund for Excellence in Engineering was established in 2017 by Lydia B. Addy and William M. Addy, 1982 graduates of Princeton University. The fund has been awarded to the following people:

Parast Abtahi , assistant professor of computer science, was awarded for his projects on Intelligent Multimodal Disambiguation for Remote Interaction in Augmented Reality and Adaptive Situation Visualization and User-Guided Counterfactual Search for Troubleshooting Autonomous Robots (with additional support from the Maxine and Seymour M. Katzson Fund for Engineering Innovation, established by Andrew C. Wright ’97 and Jonathan M. Wright ’00 and their parents, Richard and Michelle Wright).

Jia Deng, associate professor of computer science, for the Zero-Shot Complex Robotic Assembly Repeatable Benchmark project;

and Radhika Nagpal, the Norman R. Augustine Professor of Engineering, for her project on a miniature underwater robotic platform to reveal hydrodynamic synergies in schools of fish.

J. Inslee Blair Pyne Foundation

Established in memory of J. Inslee Blair Pyne, professor of physics and electrical engineering and Princeton alumnus, the fund supports research at the intersection of engineering and neuroscience. The Blair Pyne Fund has been awarded to:

Boris Hanin, assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering, who is responsible for the Principles of Graph and Equivariant Neural Networks project;

Prateek Mittal, professor of electrical and computer engineering, for the “Durable Safety: Ensuring Safety Alignment in Fine-Tuned LLM” project;

The company also collaborated with H. Vincent Phua, the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, on the “Comprehensive AI-Enabled Power Grid Management” project, which was also supported by the Yang Family Foundation.

The Tianadella Foundation

Grants from the Teanadela Foundation have been awarded to the following organizations:

Jonathan Conway, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, whose Engineering Plant-Microbe Symbiotic Interactions for Sustainable Agriculture project is also supported by the Morton and Donna Collins Fund for Engineering Innovation. Morton Collins earned his doctorate in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 1963.

Jerrell Joseph, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, for the BioCon-ModX project: A multiscale computational framework for mechanism discovery of condensed matter modifying drugs (supported in part by the Fories and O'Brien Endowments);

and Ellen Zhong, assistant professor of computer science, and Mohammad Seyedsayamdost, professor of chemistry, in a new AI technology project to revolutionize molecular structure determination, also supported by the Wilke Innovation Fund.

Jerell Joseph (third from the right) and her team use computer simulations to explore the formation of biomolecular condensates. Photo: Samir A. Khan/Fotobuddy Project X Fund

Project X grants were awarded to:

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Natalie de Leon and Professor of Chemistry Robert Knowles are working on a project to develop a new platform for single-molecule biophysics using diamond quantum sensors (also supported by the Samberg Family Fund for Innovative Engineering, founded by Deborah Samberg and Jeffrey S. Samberg).

Civil and Environmental Engineering professors Maria Garlock and Branko Grij, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Markus Hultmark, and Forrest Meggers, associate professor of architecture and director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, collaborated on the project, “Bridges to the Future: Sustainable Multifunctional Bridges for Flood and Energy Resilience,” (with support also from the Samberg Family Foundation, the Tung Slaiton Family Foundation, and the William W. Herser Jr. Innovation Fund).

Jason Klusowski, assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering, for the Combining Models to Improve Forecasting project.

Katherine Peters, professor of civil and environmental engineering, Emily A. Carter, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Satish Myneni, professor of geosciences, are involved in the project, “Naturally Producing Hydrogen While Mineralizing CO2: A Combined Pathway to Energy Decarbonization.”

Computer science lecturers Vikram Ramaswamy and Ruth Fong worked on the project, “Human-Centered Explainable AI for Computer Vision and Multimodal Models,” which was also funded by an anonymous donor.

and David Wentzlaff, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, who collaborated on the Chiplets for the Masses project, also funded by an anonymous donor.

Natalie de Leon, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is pioneering efforts to use diamonds as a platform for quantum engineering. Photo by David Kelly Crow, courtesy of the Helen Shipley Hunt Foundation.

Established by Helen Shipley Hunt, who earned her master's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1971, the fund supports research aimed at improving human health, with an emphasis on applied projects. Shipley Hunt Funds have been awarded to:

Jurgen Hackl, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering (pictured here presenting at the 2023 event hosted by Princeton University's Metropolis Project), received a grant for his Digital Twins for Intelligent Intersections project. Photo: Samir A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Jurgen Hackl, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, responsible for the Digital Twin for Intelligent Intersections project

Peter Henderson, assistant professor of computer science at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, project director for “A Law-Based Approach to Characterizing and Assessing the Potential Harms of Generative AI Output for Emerging Safety Standards”

and Olga Russakovsky , assistant professor of computer science, Jonathan Mumolo , associate professor of politics and public policy, and Brandon Stewart , associate professor of sociology, participated in the project, “Making Police-Civilian Interactions Safer: A Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Law Enforcement Visual Records.”

Additional Engineering Research Funding

Assistant Professor Ryne Beeson (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering), Assistant Professor Bartolomeo Stellato (Operations Research and Financial Engineering), Assistant Professor Adji Bousso Dieng, and Donald Ellison of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory were supported by the project “Unsupervised Conditional Generative Machine Learning for Global Nonlinear Optimal Control with Applications to Spaceflight.” This research is supported by the David T. Wilkinson Innovation Fund.

Peter Jaff, the William L. Knapp Professor of Civil Engineering, was funded for the project, “PFAS Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems: Microbial Adaptation and Changes in the Nitrogen Cycle.” His project is funded by the Moore Charitable Foundation's Science to Action Fund, which supports research aimed at understanding and improving freshwater conservation in the United States, bridging the gap between laboratory research and real-world solutions.

Peter Jaff, William L. Knapp Professor of Civil Engineering, received funding for his project, “PFAS Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems: Microbial Adaptation and Changes in the Nitrogen Cycle.” In recognition of advances in bacterial approaches to remove environmental contaminants, Jaff and expert Shan Huang received Princeton University's 2023 Dean's Award for Research Excellence in Innovation. Photo by David Kelly Crow.

Pramod Viswanath, the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering, and Wei Xiong, the John H. Scully Professor of Finance, will lead the project “Tokenomics and Ponzi: Economic Modeling of Cryptocurrency Incentives,” with support from Princeton’s Center for Decentralizing Power with Blockchain Technology (DeCenter).

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2024/06/10/2008-innovation-funds-have-fostered-research-ai-fairness-sustainable-agriculture-drug-discovery-and-more The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

What Are The Main Benefits Of Comparing Car Insurance Quotes Online

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 24, 2020, / Compare-autoinsurance.Org has launched a new blog post that presents the main benefits of comparing multiple car insurance quotes. For more info and free online quotes, please visit https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/the-advantages-of-comparing-prices-with-car-insurance-quotes-online/ The modern society has numerous technological advantages. One important advantage is the speed at which information is sent and received. With the help of the internet, the shopping habits of many persons have drastically changed. The car insurance industry hasn't remained untouched by these changes. On the internet, drivers can compare insurance prices and find out which sellers have the best offers. View photos The advantages of comparing online car insurance quotes are the following: Online quotes can be obtained from anywhere and at any time. Unlike physical insurance agencies, websites don't have a specific schedule and they are available at any time. Drivers that have busy working schedules, can compare quotes from anywhere and at any time, even at midnight. Multiple choices. Almost all insurance providers, no matter if they are well-known brands or just local insurers, have an online presence. Online quotes will allow policyholders the chance to discover multiple insurance companies and check their prices. Drivers are no longer required to get quotes from just a few known insurance companies. Also, local and regional insurers can provide lower insurance rates for the same services. Accurate insurance estimates. Online quotes can only be accurate if the customers provide accurate and real info about their car models and driving history. Lying about past driving incidents can make the price estimates to be lower, but when dealing with an insurance company lying to them is useless. Usually, insurance companies will do research about a potential customer before granting him coverage. Online quotes can be sorted easily. Although drivers are recommended to not choose a policy just based on its price, drivers can easily sort quotes by insurance price. Using brokerage websites will allow drivers to get quotes from multiple insurers, thus making the comparison faster and easier. For additional info, money-saving tips, and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/ Compare-autoinsurance.Org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc. "Online quotes can easily help drivers obtain better car insurance deals. All they have to do is to complete an online form with accurate and real info, then compare prices", said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company. CONTACT: Company Name: Internet Marketing CompanyPerson for contact Name: Gurgu CPhone Number: (818) 359-3898Email: [email protected]: https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/ SOURCE: Compare-autoinsurance.Org View source version on accesswire.Com:https://www.Accesswire.Com/595055/What-Are-The-Main-Benefits-Of-Comparing-Car-Insurance-Quotes-Online View photos