UTRGV expanding AI research, education with $2.8M grant

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Research and education at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley received a big boost with a $2.8 million grant for AI expansion and a new partnership with Georgia Institute of Technology’s AI Institute for Advances in Optimization.

The grant is from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the ExpandAI Program with the project called AI Research and Innovation for Smart Environments (ARISE). The grant will focus on increasing the university’s AI research and education capacity in courses, training and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Constantine Tarawneh, a UTRGV engineering professor and director of the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety, said the grant is the second phase of the program with the UTRGV NSF Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) for Multidisciplinary Research Excellence in Cyber-physical Infrastructure Systems already having AI capacity.

“That allowed us to jump ahead and … ExpandAI Program builds on the capacity we already started through the CREST grant,” Tarawneh said. “It’s a partnership with Georgia Tech … because our work is synergistic with what they’re doing. We’re creating AI models for infrastructure monitoring.”

One factor of the partnership with Georgia Tech is to optimize the algorithm in AI models for infrastructure monitoring and make it more efficient for sensors that can give people predictive information on if something such as a highway or railroad is about to fail or needs maintenance.

The grant has seven junior faculty, with Tarawneh being the senior faculty member. He said the partnership will have faculty trained and mentored by more seasoned faculty at Georgia Tech which can lead to more research funding and publications.

The grant helps members to build and grow their research groups and labs, such as the UTRGV Assistant Professor of Computer Science Qi Lu with the Multiple Autonomous Robert Systems (MARS) on the Edinburg campus.

The grant helps the MARS lab expand its research group and fund the students’ efforts.

UTRGV researcher Eric Rodriguez and UTRGV Graduate Researcher Javier Becerril, gave The Monitor a tour of the MARS lab, which is equipped with advanced computers, different types of robotics and drones and even a testing area.

Rodriguez said the lab is more geared toward AI applications such as a swarm system they are working on that can detect, map out, scan patterns and identify infrastructure issues.

“You’re detecting cracks inside wind blades or cracks on runways,” he said. “ It’s a lot about fusing AI and kind of like building an ensemble of one AI that does crack detection, one AI that does the monitoring, and then another AI that’s providing you … a textual report about all the info that’s out there. So it’s about putting that all together. The biggest thing about AI is data.”

Becerril currently is working on different components of a drone to help with this system and said all the students are working on different projects but all help each other out.

He said he is working on how to put different sensors and cameras on drones to fly autonomously and to analyze infrastructure.

“We’re trying to make it less resource intensive and with the collaboration between (Georgia Tech’s) lab and our lab, is that we are working on drones trying to work on drones that are autonomous,” he said. “We … want to create something where a drone can … do image processing and image recognition, identify if there’s a potential crack, put it as a waypoint, and then have the other drone come in and analyze that crack to see if it is actually something dangerous.”

The grant, as part of ARISE, is also helping push the capacity and capabilities of students and faculty to create AI specialized courses to embed into the curriculum. Tarawneh said it will also strengthen the university’s new doctoral program in computer science with interdisciplinary applications and provide training for students and faculty.

“It lines up very well with the computer science program with us offering more classes, and of course, the more variety of courses we offer,” he said. “The faculty can use that to recruit students from this class to the research, but also to the doctoral program, and that’s how you can expand the AI capacity. So now, it becomes something that is instead of reserved to four or five students, now you’re kind of creating a big funnel that can get more students into this research area and recruit more students into the AI field.”

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