We are happy to share that the AI Lab’s Dr. Abdeltawab Hendawi has won the best demo paper award for his paper titled, “Harnessing Crowdsourced Mobile Data And LLM for Dynamic and Accessible Pedestrian Routing,” at the 26th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM).
The IEEE MDM is a prestigious forum for the exchange of innovative and significant research results in mobile data management.
Congratulations, Abdeltawab!
Below are the details of our CCR / AI Lab summer workshops. Again, these are open to faculty, staff and students and are totally free. Please feel free forward this announcement to anyone who may benefit.
As usual, you can find these on the URI events calendar (and subscribe): https://events.uri.edu/group/ai
Or here is a webpage link:
https://docs.unity.uri.edu/news/2025/05/uri-summer-25-workshops/
We have some relatively new workshop offerings on AI Tools, Gen AI and Bioinformatics. A huge thanks to Indrani Mandal and our student team for planning and preparing these workshops!
Dr. Liqun Zhang, a URI computational scientist in Chemical Engineering and CCR affiliate, just published a Nature paper titled “Interaction and dynamics of chemokine receptor CXCR4 binding with CXCL12 and hBD-3“. The paper is open access and is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42004-024-01280-6
Dr. Zhang is a very heavy user of HPC at URI. She uses Unity @MGHPCC and URI HPC environments extensively for her work.
URI has been part of the National Science Foundation’s Open Storage Network (OSN) for 3 years. OSN is a collaborative between 17 top research institutions that is designed to storage vast amounts of valuable research data and allow for sharing over a high-speed network. Each institution has a storage “Pod” with over a petabyte of capacity. URI’s Pod is hosted in one of OSHEAN’s data centers that allows for extremely high-speed connectivity across the region and nationally.
More details available here: https://access-ci.org/open-storage-network-welcomes-new-campus-computing-partners/
Prof. Corey Lang and postdoctoral researcher Jarron VanCeylon just published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management titled “Voting with their (left and right) feet: Are homebuyers’ values of neighborhood environmental amenities consistent with their politics?” that was supported by the CCR.
Full paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2025.103157
Congratulations Corey and Jarron!
The Center for Computational Research is planning a series of monthly talks on AI/ML techniques and applications across various scientific domains. We envision the talks to strike a good balance between depth and breath. The goal of these talks will be to (i) introduce the particular AI/ML technique to fellow faculty and graduate students who have a basic understanding of deep learning and (ii) present a variety of applications in different domains without assuming deep domain knowledge. Each event will start with a 45 minute talk with 15 minutes for questions and a subsequent 30 minute networking session for brainstorming and further discussion. The speakers will be URI faculty from a number of colleges.
Details on the first talk appear below.
Speaker: Peter Cornillon (GSO)
Date/Time/Location: May 1st, 3pm, 112 East Hall.
Title: Machine Learning Approaches for Characterizing Global Sea Surface Temperature Fields
Abstract: Sea surface temperature (SST) fields derived from satellite-borne sensors offer an ideal dataset for exploration using machine learning techniques. In this presentation, I will describe the use of an auto-encoder, in combination with a flow equalization technique, to identify outliers in a 20-year, global, twice-daily archive of SST fields. I will then demonstrate how this same approach can be applied to evaluate the performance of a global ocean circulation model.
Switching gears, I will introduce a machine learning model based on contrastive learning applied to the same SST datasets—this time to uncover and categorize fundamental spatial patterns within the fields. Finally, I will briefly touch on an analysis of the latent space produced by the contrastive learning model, with a focus on estimating the intrinsic dimensionality of SST field variability.
URI celebrates World Quantum Day on April 11th 2025 with opening remarks from Senator Reed. Details are available here: https://physics.uri.edu/2025wqd/
April 18th noon, Galanti Lounge. Details in the attached flyer!
Andromeda–> Unity HPC Transition Plan
Over the last few years, we have built an entirely new HPC/AI environment, support system and infrastructure in partnership with UMass Amherst called UNITY: https://unity.uri.edu. We have received very positive feedback on Unity from all types of HPC/AI users at URI, and just performed a major upgrade to the system increasing capacity for URI users by ~50%. Unity is located at the MGHPCC, which is a cutting-edge near-zero Carbon facility specially designed for research computing by major research universities in our region.
Andromeda is a much older computational resource sited at URI. It has an aging storage system, obsolete security infrastructure and consumes ~18 kW of energy that results in ~40 metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. Moreover, our small support team at URI has difficulty with supporting 2 different major computational systems at multiple locations, especially given that we are in the process of building 2 additional systems (Sanctuary and Harmony) at MGHPCC.
For these reasons, we are considering transitioning URI users away from Andromeda to Unity over the next few months. Once the transition is complete, we will relocate viable Andromeda hardware and merge it into Unity so that there is minimal loss of compute capacity for URI.
Here are the details of this transition plan:
Please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns.