News

• Jan 2025: Zhiwu has moved to Wenzhou, China as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of Computer Science at Wenzhou-Kean University. 

• October 2024: Our paper  "Nuclear Pore Segmentation in 3D FIB-SEM Images with Dynamic Cyclical Data Augmentation" has been accepted by the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, with an acceptance rate of 19.7%.

• October 2024: Participate in a panel discussion (my slides are here, paper published here) with a group of library & information school deans and program directors on "Emerging Topics, Challenges, and Strategies for Information Science Research" at the 2024 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting in Calgary, Canada, Oct 25-29, 2024. Other panelists include Profs. Jiangping Chen (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), June Abbas (Univ. of Oklahoma), Bei Yu (Syracuse), and Abebe Rorissa (Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville). 

• September 2024: The Librarian-in-the-Loop Deep Learning project has reached a milestone. Please check out our preliminary results here.  We start to explore image super-resolution methods, animal pose and movement tracking, and will work with more research labs on AI-assisted data analysis.

• July 2024: Our proposal, titled "LIBRAI: Liberating Libraries through Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program", has been awarded by IMLS LB21 program. Dr Yinlin Chen from Virginia Tech Libraries is the PI. I will serve as the co-PI from UCR.

• June 2024: Funded by NSF DS-PATH program, two groups of five students each, including Data Science graduate, undergraduate, and associate degree students from UCR, CSUSB, and local community colleges, joined my team on 10-week intern to label biomed images and Lidar data. The latter is a new collaboration with UCR CISL and Prof. Hang Qiu.

• June 2024: UCR selected the Riverside Artificial Intelligence ReSEarch (RAISE) Institute out of 16 proposals for its inaugural Campus Interdisciplinary Research Center (CIRC). I am one of the 85 members (about 10% of UCR’s total faculty) included in the RAISE Institute proposal.

• Mar 2024: NSF awards $498,553 to UCR ITS's proposal "Research Infrastructure: CC* Data Storage: Foundational Campus Research Storage for Digital Transformation", which I have helped draft and provided one of its science drivers.

• Mar 8, 2024: I gave a talk titled "AI Enhanced Segmentation of Very Large FIB-SEM Images For Cell Biology" at UCR's Data Science Seminar.

• Feb 2024: My lightning talk "Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom: An Organic Funding Model To Incubate Library Transformation", has been accepted for CNI’s Spring 2024 Membership Meeting. Watch the recorded video (with slides), 

• Feb 2024: Videos of my presentations on both IMLS funded projects: 1) Joint Professional Development Institute for Librarians and 2) AI assisted very large biomed image segmentation, have been released by CNI Pre-recorded Project Briefing, 2024 February edition.

• Jan 2024: My team at UCR Library has been selected to participate in the maDMSP pilot. See ARL news release here. 

• Dec 2023: My student Chongyu He successfully defended his MS thesis, "Deep Learning Approach for Cell Nuclear Pore Detection and Quantification over High Resolution 3D Data," at Virginia Tech. Chongyu is now a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Virginia.

• Nov 2023: I am selected as a fellow of the 2023-24 Association of Research Libraries Leadership Fellows Program.

• Sep 2023: Institute of Museum & Library Services  awarded $149,216  to my proposal "Curating Very Large Biomedical Image Datasets For Librarian-In-The-Loop Deep Learning" through the National Leadership Grant for Library (NLG-L) program. 

• Aug 2023: Institute of Museum & Library Services awarded $499,966 (with $321,903 additional cost share) to my proposal "Joint Professional Development Institute To Cultivate Collaborative Library Scholars" through its Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian (LB21) program 

• Aug 2023: Our paper "A Real-Time Processing and Visualization Framework for High-Volume Smart Infrastructure Data" has been published by Automation in Construction (IF=10.3, 2022 JIF Rank #2 out of 139, Q1, in Civil Engineering & 2022 JCI Rank #2 out of 89, Q1, in Construction & Building Technology).

• Jan 2023: My student Xinyue Wang successfully defended his PhD dissertation "Large Web Archive Collection Infrastructure and Services" at Virginia Tech. Xinyue now works at Yahoo! as a research scientist.

For details, please visit the Projects section.