News and Recent Research


July 2022

–Dr. Grace McIlvain presents joint work from the Prof. Johnson’s Mechanical Neuroimaging Lab (MNL) instigated by MNL’s Rebecca Clements (undergraduate thesis) and assisted by César: “Mechanical property-based brain age prediction using artificial neural networks”, World Congress of Biomechanics, Taipei, Taiwan. Journal version to be submitted soon!

June 2022

—César passes the Ph.D. qualifying examination.

—Alex Mulrooney starts the (undergraduate) Summer Scholars Program

—Karen Andrea Fonseca, B.S. (Industrial University of Santander, Bucaramanga, Colombia), joins us as a visiting research working on application of contrastive learning representations for improving detection of diffuse phenomena in astronomical images in collaboration with Prof. Federica Bianco as part of an NSF funded grant

May 2022

–Keider, Oscar, and Dr. Luis Sanchez Giraldo, collaborators at the University of Kentucky, present recent work on divergence estimation at ICASSP 2022

–Bilal finishes a masters thesis “On spectral clustering, informativeness and seriation”

–Received a University of Delaware Research Foundation (UDRF) grant to support “Mapping and Decoding the Brain’s Activity during Human-AI Interaction” research 6/1/2022–5/31/2024

–Yuksel won the best poster award at the UD ECE Research Day for the Signal Processing, Communication, and Control research area with “Kernel Landmark: An Empirical Statistical Approach to Detect Covariate Shift”, co-authored with Bilal

April 2022

–“Highlighted Reviewer of ICLR 2022” (top 8.7% = top 543 of 6,207 reviewers)

–UD College of Engineering Faculty Award for Excellence in Service & Community Engagement

December 2021

—Good luck to all the conference presenters this month:

  • ACNP: Kristina Holton, S. Y. Chan, A. J. Brockmeier, D. Öngür, and M-H. Hall “Exploring the influences of functional connectivity architecture on cortical thickness networks in patients with early psychosis”, 60th Annual Meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 12/2021.
  • Machine Learning for Health (ML4H): Hassan Baker, A. J. Brockmeier “Exploring latent networks in resting-state fMRI using voxel-to-voxel causal modeling feature selection” Paper, Poster
  • Machine Learning for Health (ML4H): Kristina Holton, S. Y. Chan, A. J. Brockmeier, D. Öngür, and M-H. Hall “Exploring latent networks in resting-state fMRI using voxel-to-voxel causal modeling feature selection”
  • DistShift @ NeurIPS: Yuksel Karahan, Bilal Riaz, and A. J. Brockmeier “Kernel landmarks: An empirical statistical approach to detect covariate shift”, Workshop on Distribution Shifts, 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) Paper, Poster, 5 min Presentation.
  • DistShift @ NeurIPS: A. J. Brockmeier, Claudio Cesar Claros Olivares, M. S. Emigh, and L. G. Sanchez Giraldo “Identifying the instances associated with distribution shifts using the max-sliced Bures divergence”, Workshop on Distribution Shifts, 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) Paper, Poster, 5 min Presentation.

—Carlos presents his proposal “Learning Representative Waveforms to Analyze, Summarize, and Compare Long-term Neural Recordings”

November 2021

—Kris wins best (joint) poster award at DSI’s 2021 Delaware Data Science Symposium with her work “Exploring the influences of functional connectivity architecture on cortical thickness networks in patients with early psychosis” Poster, Lightning presentation

—Carlos presented his work at EMBC'21, “Shift-invariant waveform learning on epileptic ECoG” PDF

October 2021

—Kristina (Kris) Holton, Certificate Program for Bioinformatics and Data Science, abstract and extended abstract accepted to Annual Meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and Machine Learning for Health (ML4H).

—Hassan’s extended abstract also accepted to Machine Learning for Health (ML4H).

—César’s paper and Yüksel and Bilal’s paper accepted to DistShift at NeurIPS 2021.

September 2021

—Hassan passes the Ph.D. qualifying examination.

—Dr. Brockmeier will serve as Co-Investigator on a NIH-funded R21 project “Integrative Data Analysis to Identify Persistent Post-Concussion Deficits and Subsequent Musculoskeletal Injury Risk” led by Dr. Thomas Buckley

—NSF funds a “Harnessing the Data Revolution” traineeship on “Computing and Data Science Training for Materials Innovation, Discovery, Analytics” (MIDAS) led by Dr. Arthi Jayaraman. (Dr. Brockmeier will serve as senior personnel.)

  • 1st year Ph.D. students interested in using AI, machine learning, and data science to solve problems in polymeric material design
  • 2nd year Ph.D. students will have a pilot offering of the problem-focused team oriented ‘hackathon’ course

— NSF funds a “Harnessing the Data Revolution” undergraduate research and training “Delaware and Mid-Atlantic Data Science Corps” NSF 2123264 led by Dr. Federica Bianco et al. (Dr. Brockmeier will serve as senior personnel.)

August 2021

—Summer Scholars (Evan Curtin and Justin Labombard) present at the Undergraduate Research and Service Scholar Celebratory Symposium

  • Evan Curtin, “Non-Negative Matrix Factorization as Dictionary Learning for Audio Separation” Poster PDF
  • Justin Labombard, “Dictionary Learning on Eplieptic ECoG Waveforms” Poster PDF

—Kick off of new NSF-funded project led by Dr. Federica Bianco on AI for astronomy: ``Detecting and studying light echoes in the era of Rubin and artificial intelligence'' NSF 2108841

July 2021

Andres Nicolas Lopez, MSc. (National University of Colombia), joins us as a visiting research working on modeling the uncertainty and errors of machine learning models University of Delaware’s Latin and South America Summer Program

—Carlos’s second paper accepted to EMBC'21

  • “Shift-invariant waveform learning on epileptic ECoG” Pre-print PDF
July 2021

—Evan, Justin, and Thomas start the (undergraduate) Summer Scholars Program

May 2021

—Carlos and Hassan presented their work as posters at NER'21

  • Hassan presented “Local and Sparse Linear Causal Models for fMRI Resting-State Signals” Full-text (IEEE) | Poster PDF
  • Carlos presented “Searching for Waveforms on Spatially-Filtered Epileptic ECoG” Full-text (IEEE) | PDF | Poster PDF
  • We made the top-5 finalist for the Neural Engineering Community Award
April 2021

—Kick off of new ONR-funded project on interpretable divergences

January 2021

Hassan awarded Gore Engineering Graduate Fellowship for Spring 2021.

Hau Phan joins the lab to work on a collaborative ONR-funded project for bioinspired processing of chemical signals.

September 2020

Bilal passes the Ph.D. qualifying examination.

August 2020

César completes his Master’s thesis “Synergistic Human-Machine Prediction: Active Error Analysis and Mitigation with Gaussian Process Regression”.

February 2020

Hassan joins the lab to work on a neuroimaging and graph signal processing project.