Shahria is designing a vision-based assistive robot control system that allows users with disabilities to identify and locate objects, use the robotic grippers to manipulate them, and perform pick-and-place tasks by speaking commands rather than manually manipulating the robot.

Shahria, a member of Professor Habib Rahman’s mechanical engineering lab, is creating a deep learning-based model that also uses a depth camera and mapping function to detect and interact with items.

The support is part of the Fall 2024 “Student Scholars Program” of the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute (NMDSI).

This is Shahria’s third consecutive award from NMDSI, and the support has allowed him to develop different components of this system over several semesters.

The  is a partnership among the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette University and Northwestern Mutual that aims to make southeastern Wisconsin a national hub for data science technology, research, business and talent development.

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Singh works at the intersection of mathematics and computer science.  His work involves designing computationally efficient algorithms to derive meaningful information from big datasets. This semester, he is teaching “Algorithm Design & Analysis,” “Fundamentals of Computer Graphics,” “Data Structure and Algorithms,” and “Scientific Data Visualization.”

He holds a master’s degree from the University of Florida and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati.

Nipu comes from UW-Platteville, where she taught undergraduate courses. At the College of Engineering & Applied Science, she is teaching a variety of programming and software engineering courses, from sophomore to graduate levels, with a strong focus on C++ and Java.

Her research interest includes the use of artificial intelligence for natural language processing in healthcare applications. She earned her master’s degree in computer science at Missouri State University with a graduate certificate in data science. Before moving to the U.S., she was a software developer in Bangladesh.

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Description: Data is one of the most valuable commodities in the world. It is the inescapable foundation of any and all AI. And yet, data management, transformation, and utilization remain incredibly hard problems, nearly intractably difficult at exascale. In this talk, we will discuss some of the reasons why this is so, why it will always be so, and the fundamental building blocks we can use to find some solace in this impossible yet unavoidable problem.

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Description: When you write code that uses multiple threads, how can you tune the performance with regard to callbacks, thread pools and timers? The quest to come up with a satisfying answer to this question has taken me on a journey from the highest levels of algebraic abstraction all the way down to the transistor pathways of a modern CPU. In this talk, we’ll dive headlong into a problem space familiar to the ancestral practitioners of computer engineering, now long forgotten amongst the convenience of modern systems.

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Tim Miller will describe recent work from his Machine Learning for Medical Language Lab at 11 a.m. today in EMS E20. His talk will connect the field of biomedical NLP with the emergence of a powerful class of models known as large language models (LLMs).

He will address questions like: How important is dataset creation? Will NLP experts and subject matter experts need each other anymore? Will LLMs still suffer from out-of-domain performance loss as supervised models?

Miller is an associate professor in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science. His research focuses on domain adaptation/generalizability of ML-based NLP methods, and learning patient representations.

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A few of his recent accolades in the last year include:

• Microsoft made TIME’s list of most influential companies of the year, highlighting the company’s heavy investments in AI. (Nadella was listed on the TIME 100 list of most influence people in 2018.) 
• CNN Business chose Nadella as its CEO of the Year, beating out other high-profile businesspeople. The reason, according to the CNN judging panel, was that Nadella was the first to commercialize and add AI tools like ChatGPT into its product line, influencing the commercial direction of AI.
• The Georgia Institute of Technology presented Nadella with an honorary doctoral degree.

The company’s rise has coincided with its support for STEM education and automation research at 51���� with the College of Engineering & Applied Science as the main recipient.

“Microsoft’s support of 51���� has revolved around some of the same priorities that fueled the company’s business in the last decade,” said Brett Peters, dean of 51����’s College of Engineering & Applied Science. “For instance, Microsoft donated credits of its leading Cloud processing software service, Azure, to 51����’s Connected Systems Institute. And Satya and his wife Anu have expanded that to also focus on workforce development and diversity, with their generous support of our local students.”

Support for 51���� research

Microsoft has been a key partner in 51����’s Connected Systems Institute (CSI), a statewide research hub that brings together academia, industry and government to solve real-world problems using the industrial internet of things.

In 2019, Microsoft gave 51���� more than $1.5 million in cash, Microsoft Azure cloud computing credits and Surface Hub devices to advance CSI.

Microsoft followed that up recently, in January 2024, with a second donation of $1.2 million to CSI. The gift will be used to educate Wisconsin’s talent pipeline for Industry 4.0 manufacturing, which allows small and medium manufacturers to integrate new technologies, such as the internet of things, AI and smart robotics, into their production processes. 

“CSI, with the help of Microsoft, has moved rapidly into the AI space with the hopes of providing tangible technology solutions to manufacturers,” said Microsoft Chief AI Officer Balamurugan Balakreshnan. “For example, CSI recently completed research on an AI vision system and deployed at CSI an AI chatbot that assists manufacturers on the shop floor in accessing information quickly.”

Shamar Webster (’23 MS Computer Science) worked with Balakreshnan in creating the factory chatbox last fall in his final semester before graduation.

Scholarships for students from underserved communities

In 2021, Nadella and wife Anu Nadella also donated $2 million to support scholarships for undergraduate students from marginalized and underserved communities, preparing them with the skills to pursue careers in computer science, data science and information technology. The gift also funds expanded student services, such as advising, mentoring and tutoring, as well as emergency grant support to help these students remain successful in pursuing their degrees.

Finally, the gift supports pre-college programming to encourage students from marginalized and underserved communities to enroll in these STEM fields. 

The College of Engineering & Applied Science welcomed the first and second cohorts of scholarship winners with full-ride scholarships in Fall 2022 and 2023, respectively.

In 2018, Nadella made a $250,000 contribution to an set up in emeritus professor K. Vairavan’s name. Many computer science, electrical and computer engineering students have benefited annually from this fund.

Nadella grew up in the southern India and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Mangalore University. He moved to the U.S. to study at 51����. In 2013, he received the 51���� Chancellor’s Innovation Award for his leadership of Microsoft’s Server & Tools Division, a year before being named as CEO of Microsoft. In 2021, “Chairman” was added to his title.

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