We are thrilled to announce that the DoIT Research Computing (RC) team was awarded two ASPIRE II grant awards for their supporting work with collaborative Science Gateway and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects. The first grant, worked on by Jun Zhou, an AI scientist with the RC team, was for the project titled “Image Analysis Algorithms for Digital Surrogates of Historical Motion Picture Film.” This project is focused on developing new algorithms to identify text information appearing in the digital surrogates. The project explores the feasibility of facial recognition applied to historic motion picture films and building and deploying a project website that includes secure streaming protocols that prevent unauthorized downloading of video files. Integrated data from Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms provides a portal for researchers collaborating with the team in the future to access high-resolution imagery for their work. The total award for this project was $99,456.

The second grant award is for the project titled “SnowVision: Recreating Native North American Carved Paddle Designs.” This project is focused on developing a sherd-to-sherd matching tool for the purpose of recreating Native North American carved paddle designs. This project has a highly diverse team of researchers and is currently developing Science Gateway tools that significantly leverages AI and Machine Learning. This grant is a continuation of the SnowVision project, also worked on by AI scientist Jun Zhou. The total award for this project was $99,774. This brings the total amount of grant money that the Research Computing team earned to $199,230.