Dr. Jonathan Adams and his team of Computer Science students are working hard on developing applications for Artificial Intelligence (AI). “We were awarded a grant by the Student Technology Fee Advisory Committee, which allowed us to buy a computer designed for machine learning.” Dr. Adams explains. He then recruited two students from the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) and an intern to develop research projects using the computer to recognize objects with a video camera. “We learned a lot about data management, machine training, and transfer learning, so our research focused on describing the training process from a work-flow perspective,” Dr. Adams says. Transfer learning tries to build on training the computer has already received, requiring less data, and less time to train the machine to recognize new objects.

So far, the student researchers have been able to determine that some extent of transfer learning does occur when training an AI computer. Although Dr. Adams explains that AI has been difficult to train, he does believe the technology has a lot of promise. “There are a lot of issues surrounding the use of this technology that have not been sorted out yet… [But] I believe that AI can be used to help researchers collect data [and] play a role in visual data collection.” he explains. The research team will present their work in April, at the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education conference sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, and for the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

This summer, Dr. Adams and his team will continue their research in the field with an IDEA grant that they recently received from the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement.The team plans to work with a group of researchers from the Biology Department to find, and identify turtles in the wild.