IDEA Lab News

  • 04/03/2024 Chenhao Li successfully passed his PhD proposal defense. Congrats!
  • 03/25/2024 Dr. Wenjia Li received research and travel grants from FARR-RCN and PyRATES for reserach on geoinformatics and data science.
  • 11/25/2023 PhD student Jiyin Zhang was selected as an ESIP Community Fellow (2023-2024) by the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
  • 11/20/2023 PhD students Jiyin Zhang and Weilin Chen each received a travel grant from University of California, San Diego to attend the AGU Fall Meeting 2023 at San Francisco, CA
  • 11/15/2023 Undergraduate stduent Meghan Nulf was offered a software engineering intership at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL).
  • 11/14/2023 We successfully organized another mineral informatics datathon at Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC.
  • 10/16/2023 PhD Student Jiyin Zhang received support from the GSA On To the Future program to present work at GSA2023 conference at Pittsburgh, PA.
  • 10/16/2023 A book of geoinformatics and data science led by Marshall was published by GSA!
  • 08/20/2023 Postdoc Dr. Jingyi Huang will join a law office in Shanghai as a scientist. Congrats!
  • 08/17/2023 Postdoc Dr. Chao Fan joined New Mexico State Univeristy as an tenure-track assistant professor. Congrats!
  • 07/30/2023 PhD student Jiyin Zhang received travel support from NSF Earthcube program to attend a workshop at USC. Congrats!
  • 05/25/2023 Postdoc Dr. Sanaz Salati joined Univeristy of Arizona as a scientist. Congrats!
  • 05/20/2023 We organized a mineral informatics datathon at Moscow, ID with participants from several institutions.
  • 04/25/2023 Marshall was selected for the 2023 UI Postdoctoral Mentoring Award and Excellence in Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Efforts Award.
  • 04/15/2023 Dr. Zhe Wang will join us as a postdoctoral research associate to work on spatial data science. Welcome!
  • 03/25/2023 Amruta, Rayan, and Fatimah successfully defended their PhD dissertations. Congrats!
  • 01/20/2023 Thea and Meghan join the lab as NSF REU interns to work on data science. Welcome!
  • 12/22/2022 We organized a mineral informatics datathon at Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC and six members of IDEA Lab attended.
  • 10/29/2022 Sanaz and Amruta both received the NSF EarthCube Early-Career Travel Grant for the AGU 2022 Fall Meeting. Congrats!
  • 10/14/2022 Nature published Marshall's correspondence on scientific unions' efforts on data standards. (full text preprint)
  • 09/30/2022 Marshall was selected as the Univeristy of Idaho College of Engineering Dean's Distinguished Fellow (2022-2024)!
  • 09/29/2022 Two papers (paper 1, paper 2) were the top downloaded (May-Aug., 2022) of the journal Computers & Geosciences.
  • 09/28/2022 Dr. Jingyi Huang joined us as a new postdoctoral fellow. Welcome!
  • 08/25/2022 Weilin Chen joined us as a new PhD student. Welcome!
  • 07/25/2022 Congrats to PhD student Amruta for winning Funding Friday Award at the ESIP 2022 summer meeting!
  • 06/16/2022 Marshall served as a panelist to discuss semantics of open science network at the NSF EarthCube 2022 Annual Meeting at San Diego, CA.
  • 06/02/2022 PhD student Rayan was awarded an UI-IMCI Data Access Grant to improve Multiple Sclerosis treatment. Congrats!
  • 05/30/2022 Dr. Xiang Que joins the team as a postdoctral researcher. Welcome!
  • 05/27/2022 PhD student Fatimah published her literature review of textual hate speed detection methods on MDPI Information journal. Congrats!
  • 05/10/2022 Marshall gave a keynote talk at the First Workshop on Geospatial Knowledge Graphs with The Knowledge Graph Conference 2022.
  • 04/25/2022 Amruta successfully defended her PhD proposal. Congrats!
  • 03/05/2022 Marshall's review article on geoscience knowledge graph was published on Computers & Geosciences.
  • 02/20/2022 PhD student Amruta published her literature review of provenance to enable Explainable AI on Data Intelligence. Congrats!
  • 12/15/2021 Sanaz Salati joined us as a postdoctoral researcher on geoinformatics. Welcome!
  • 09/21/2021 Chenhao Li and Jiyin Zhang joined us to begin their PhD study. Welcome!
  • 09/20/2021 Marshall received two supplemental grants (total $0.6M) from NSF to expand the research of the TickBase project.
  • 08/10/2021 Marshall received a $0.8M NSF EarthCube grant to work on open data and mineral evolution.
  • 05/20/2021 Marshall received the 2020-2021 Outstanding Early Career Faculty Award from the College of Engineering.
  • 04/29/2021 Omar, Ashrf, and Raed successfully defended their PhD dissertations. Congrats!
  • 11/19/2020 Abdullah successfully defended his PhD dissertation on 11/19/2020. Congrats!
  • 11/14/2020 Rayan's review article of AI and Decision Making in Multiple Sclerosis Research was published in Patterns.
  • 09/29/2020 The GeoWeaver proposal (Marshall as Co-PI) was approved by the 2019 NASA ACCESS program.
  • 09/09/2020 PhD student Omar Alghushairy successfully passed his proposal defense. Congrats!
  • 09/05/2020 Our proposal on using big data to study tick-borne disease was approved by NSF!
  • 08/04/2020 Our paper (10.1016/j.cageo.2017.12.007) is in the list of Most Cited Articles 2017-2019 of Computers & Geosciences (Elsevier).
  • 07/01/2020 Our NSF REU Supplement proposal was awarded, which will provide several internships of data science to undergraduate students!
  • 06/26/2020 Chao, Xiang and Marshall organized a session for the Earth Science meets Data Science workshop at Goldschmidt 2020. See session 3 of recorded videos on Youtube.
  • 06/01/2020 PhD student Omar Alghushairy received Travel Award from UI Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA).
  • 05/27/2020 Marshall gave a presention on version control in deep time knowledge graph at ESIP SemTech Webinar. Recorded video on Youtube
  • 05/25/2020 Four MSc students Lamyaa, Smarth, Bhargav and Abhinav were awarded their degrees in Spring 2020. Congrats!
  • 05/15/2020 Three PhD students Abdullah, Fatimah and Ashrf successfully passed their proposal defenses in Spring 2020.
  • 03/15/2020 A paper led by PhD students Omar and Raed on local outlier detection in data stream was published at ICCDA2020.
  • 12/02/2019 A book chapter Data Streaming led by graduate student Raed was published in Encyclopedia of Big Data (Springer).
  • 11/15/2019 Marshall, Chao, Xiang and Rongbin presented several research outputs at the 2019 GIS Day @ University of Idaho.
  • 10/21/2019 Two more book chapters led by graduate students, Collaborative Filtering and Deep Learning, were published in Encyclopedia of Big Data (Springer).
  • 09/26/2019 Marshall gave an invited talk on data visualization in mineral evolution studies at GSA 2019 conference.
  • 09/09/2019 Two book chapters, Data brokers and data services and Data storage, both led by graduate students, were published in Encyclopedia of Big Data (Springer).
  • 09/01/2019 Prof. Haifeng Lian, Ms. Rongbin Tang, and Ms. Can Cai will conduct research in our group for one year. Welcome!
  • 07/20/2019 Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Chao Ma received the ESIP 2019 Funding Friday Award for his propsoal on a paleoclimate database, Congrats!
  • 05/31/2019 The first Deep Time Data Science Mini-Workshop at Moscow, ID was a big success. Thanks to all attendees and organizers for your time!
  • 04/30/2019 PhD student Rayan Alshamrani awarded Best Poster at the 2019 UI Computer Science Industrial Advisory Board Meeting.
  • 04/22/2019 Dr. Kathy Fontaine from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute visited us and gave a talk at the CS seminar series.
  • 04/20/2019 Marshall gave an invited plenary talk "Towards a machine-readable knowledge base of deep time" at the Fifth Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) Working Group Seminar, Kunshan, China.
  • 04/08/2019 Dr. Rui Yan from Microsoft visited us and gave a talk at the CS seminar series.
  • 03/25/2019 Marshall gave a seminar at Carnegie Institution for Science, Geophysical Laboratory for the work on a deep time knowledge base.
  • 03/08/2019 Fatimah Alkomah joins the group to work on her PhD research of social media data analysis. Welcome!
  • 03/05/2019 Marshall gave two invited plenary keynote talks at the International Forum on Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) Big Science Program and the 644th Session of the Xiangshan Science Conference, Beijing, China.
  • 02/04/2019 PhD student Abdullah Al-Owairdhi won research grant in the 2018 Fall ESIP Lab competition. Congrats!
  • 02/01/2019 Dr. Chao Ma joined the lab as a postdoc to work on geologic time knowledge graphs. Welcome!
  • 01/12/2019 Marshall is appointed as associate edtior of a new Elsevier journal Applied Computing and Geosciences.
  • 12/15/2018 Fatemh and Salil graduated with their MSc degrees. Congratulations!
  • 11/29/2018 We received funding from Sloan, NSF and AI Journal to support students and early career professionals in US to attend US2TS2019. Apply HERE.
  • 10/20/2018 Marshall's paper is part of a shortlisted article collection in the 2018 Frontiers Spotlight Award Finalist.
  • 10/01/2018 Our NSF CSSI propsoal on a knowledge base of deep time is approved!
  • 09/30/2018 The IDEA lab has and open for application till Dec. 01, 2018.
  • 09/12/2018 Rayan joins the lab to work for a PhD degree. Welcome!
  • 09/10/2018 Dr. Linyun Fu from Twitter visited us and gave a talk at the CS seminar series.
  • 08/31/2018 Nawaf and Khalid join the lab as PhD students. Welcome!
  • 08/30/2018 Adhar and Rohit join the lab as Master students. Welcome!
  • 06/13/2018 Our (led by Carrie Roever@NKN) won the at the Science of Team Science (SciTS) 2018 Conference, Galveston, TX!
  • 06/04/2018 Our paper on is accepted by Earth Science Informatics.
  • 05/04/2018 Salil Reddy joins the IDEA lab as a master student. Welcome!
  • 05/04/2018 Congrats to Bhuwan Madhikarmi, the first MSc graduated from the IDEA lab!
  • 05/03/2018 Our paper on is accepted for publication in the Data Science Journal.
  • 04/18/2018 Our paper on is published in the Algorithm journal.
  • 03/08/2018 Three journal papers led by Chengbin Wang and Qiyu Chen were accepted for publicaiton recently. Job well done!
  • 03/04/2018 Raed and Omar joined the IDEA lab to work on data science and geospatial topics for their PhD studies. Welcome!
  • 03/01/2018 Lamyaa and Fatemh joined the IDEA lab to work on data science topics for their MSc studies. Welcome!
  • 02/14/2018 Our proposal for the is funded by the .
  • 01/05/2018 Marshall's article was accepted for publication in the Springer Encyclopedia of Big Data.
  • 12/19/2017 Chengbin's paper on information extraction and knowledge graph construction from geoscience literature was accepted by Computers & Geosciences.
  • 12/04/2017 Our NSF proposal for the student travel grants of US2TS 2018 was approved.
  • 11/29/2017 Ashrf, Khalid, and Fahad joined the lab as PhD students to work on topics in data science. Welcome!
  • 11/26/2017 Marshall joined the Elsevier journal Computers and Geosciences as associate editor.
  • 11/14/2017 Our paper 'Using visual exploratory data analysis to facilitate collaboration and hypothesis generation in cross-disciplinary research' from the DTDI project was accepted for publication in ISPRS IJGI.
  • 10/30/2017 Marshall was elected as vice-chair (2018) for the Geoinformatics Division of the Geological Society of America.
  • 10/16/2017 Dr. Li Sun joined the lab as a visiting scholar to work on geoinformatics and mathematical geosciences.
  • 10/02/2017 Marshall's short article "Data Repository" was accepted for publication in the Springer Encyclopedia of Big Data.
  • 09/14/2017 Congrats to Chengbin Wang for receiving the 2017 Computers&Geosciences Research Scholarship.
  • 08/01/2017 Marshall's manuscript on data science and geoscience was accepted for publication in "Handbook of Mathematical Geosciences: Fifty Years of IAMG" by Springer.
  • 06/22/2017 Marshall will co-chair the Hackathon session 'Social Network Analysis of Non-social Data' at ACM Web Science Conference 2017, Tory, NY.
  • 06/05/2017 Marshall's three articles Metadata, Spatial Data and Visualization in the Springer Encyclopedia of Big Data were published online.
  • 05/27/2017 Marshall gave an invited talk at the Workshop for Research Data Management of ACA2017, New Orleans, LA.
  • 05/25/2017 Marshall, Chengbin, Xin and Prof. Jamil attended a data science workshop at Reston, VA with travel supports from USGS.
  • 05/17/2017 Marshall's paper on Linked Geoscience Data practices was accepted by Earth Science Informatics.
  • 05/08/2017 Our paper on fractal pattern generation in digital mapping was accepted by Computers & Geosciences.
  • 05/01/2017 Our paper on weaving a knowledge network for DCO was accepted by Frontiers in Earth Science - Geochemistry.
  • 04/25/2017 Marshall gave an invited talk on data science for geoscience at AbSciCon2017.
  • 04/15/2017 Marshall and Tim Sonnen's research proposal was winner in the MILES Undergraduate Research and Internships (MURI) 2017 Summer Program.
  • 04/14/2017 Congrats to Xin for receiving the 2017 IEEE ICDE Student Travel Grant.
  • 04/12/2017 Marshall's research proposal was approved by the 2017 University of Idaho ORED Seed Grant Program.
  • 03/28/2017 Congrats to Xin for being accepted as Sloan- and NSF-funded 2017-2018 RDA/US Early Career Data Share Fellow.
  • 03/03/2017 Marshall Ma joined the technical advisory committee of the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance at Columbia University.
  • 02/20/2017 The VisFlow work led by Xin was selected one of the finalists for the Demo Track at ICDE2017.
  • 02/05/2017 Marshall Ma was appointed as guest professor of computer science at China University of Geoscience, Wuhan.
  • 01/19/2017 Marshall Ma was appointed as representative of IUGS and CGI to CODATA.
  • 01/11/2017 Bhuwan Madhikarmi joined the lab as MSc student and Olivier Bizimana joined as RA for Spring 2017.
  • 01/07/2017 Marshall Ma joined the advisory committee of the Northwest Knowledge Network.
  • 12/05/2016 Marshall Ma to lead the CODATA Task Group on coordinating data standards amongst scientific unions.
  • 11/11/2016 Our work on documenting provenance of marine ecosystem assessment was published.
  • 09/29/2016 Marshall Ma attended GSA2016 at Denver to present work on visualizing co-relations between elements and minerals.
  • 09/22/2016 Chengbin Wang joined us as a visiting scholar (1 yr) to work on natural languange processing and knowledge modeling.
  • 09/14/2016 Marshall Ma attended the International Data Week at Denver as a panelist. [Video]
  • 09/02/2016 Abdullah Al-Owairdhi joined the lab as a PhD student to work on Semantic Web methods and applications.