Sudip Vhaduri, an assistant professor in the School of Computer and Information Technology (CIT) with a doctorate in computer science and research focus on machine learning, has been awarded a $75,000 grant from the Ralph W. and Grace M. Showalter Trust for his research focused on discovering bioacoustic patterns to support the development of future technologies to diagnose respiratory diseases.
The Showalter Foundation was established in 1975 to support faculty conducting medical and scientific research with the mission of improving human health. The program prioritizes projects that are likely to obtain or utilize federal funds and that will create programs with a longer lifespan than the Showalter Award. It encourages interdisciplinary proposals that establish new research relationships and new research directions.
Vaduri’s project is aligned with one of the Showalter Trust’s priority research areas: prevention, diagnosis, progression, treatment and control of disease. The study will focus on finding the relationship between influenza, idiopathic and pathological cough using data visualization techniques. The project’s main goal is to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to help researchers better understand cough patterns, which can help innovate and accelerate the diagnostic process for respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 in future studies.
Purdue Polytechnic has three major research impact areas:
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The future of work and learning
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Total Safety and Security
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Enabling the Digital Enterprise
Vaduri’s research contributes to all three fields with the goal of making an impact on major global challenges, and he hopes that his findings will inspire other faculty to apply for grant funding for their own research projects.
“This research is exciting because it opens up innovative avenues for developing AI technologies that can help millions of people, potentially improving humanity and all of humanity in the future,” Vaduri said.
Vaduri leads Purdue’s Mobile Artificial Intelligence (mAI) Lab, which has similar research projects including wearable computing devices and soft biometrics. The mAI Lab’s goal is to “pave the way for innovative mobile tools that transform healthcare and empower individuals to proactively manage their health and well-being.” The acoustic pattern research project will involve the mAI Lab team as well as clinician collaborators from the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University.
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