Cognitive decline is a major and growing public health issue. We’re researching how a working memory for a particular sensory input or object — like the shape of a car, or its location in a parking lot — is encoded and represented in the brain. We want to better understand how shape and space are characterized in different brain regions, and how attention, memory and task demands influence those representations. This is key not only to describing and diagnosing attention deficits in human disorders, but also to developing more effective interventions.

In 2019, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention…

Approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population has some type of disability — comprising the largest minority in the nation, spanning all races and ethnicities, socioeconomic groups, and genders. This has an obvious personal impact, along with an economic one, as disability prevents many working-age individuals from participating in the workforce. Yet each of these individuals can contribute to society if given the right tools, training and opportunities. That’s where assistive technology, or AT, comes in.

AT encompasses a broad spectrum of technologies that help people with all kinds of disabilities, as well as the aging population, be more effective…

The healthcare industry in the United States is enormous. In 2019, U.S. healthcare spending was $3.8 trillion — 17.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and $11,518 per person, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. This industry of patient care also is enormously complex, with the accumulated data of myriad patients, clinicians, support staff, and institutional providers including hospitals.

That’s where data science comes in. A multifaceted “system of systems,” healthcare benefits greatly from the use of data science tools — like analytics, machine learning, causal inference, and network science — to sort through all the data…

This is the age of data science. The revolution in information technology that has swept the world these past decades has reached the point where there are massive amounts of data being collected and circulated continuously, powerful computational platforms capable of processing that data, and extraordinary benefits awaiting those who can make sense of it all.

Enter data science, an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and actionable insights from data, and then apply the knowledge and insights across a broad range of application domains. …

After they drop the flag to start the race at the Indy Autonomous Challenge in October, the grand prize won’t go to the best driver but to the best-performing sensors, slickest algorithms, and fastest-thinking artificial intelligence (AI). Data science will determine the winner on the 2.5-mile oval at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, when the race teams, all using the same Dallara-built AV-21 chassis, send out their driverless vehicles in search of victory.

In the first-of-its-kind race Oct. 21-23, Purdue is fielding one of those teams — Black & Gold Autonomous Racing — in collaboration with faculty and students from…

How do we best understand the spread of COVID-19 in order to institute the proper controls to mitigate the virus? Mathematical modeling provides a systematic way, based on fundamental principles and more than a century of research, to try to capture the behavior of the viral reach. Accurate models of COVID-19 can help decision makers predict the epidemic’s course, while provable algorithms can offer guidance on how to alleviate the spread.

In a very basic sense, an algorithm is a systemic set of decisions, based on the current situation, that adjusts iteratively as the algorithm progresses through its analytic data…

Good nutrition is not only essential for healthy development and basic survival, but also integral to well-being and disease prevention. Health conditions linked to poor diet constitute the most frequent and preventable causes of death in the U.S. and are major drivers of healthcare costs, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. While diet needs to be understood in order to be improved, dietary intake remains difficult to measure.

Our research group has designed and developed one of the first mobile, image-based dietary assessment systems that records and analyzes images of eating occasions to accurately measure daily food…

Digital transformation leaves no stone unturned as it remakes the world for the better. Agriculture is no exception, and is witnessing a digital revolution that aims to bring the most advanced practices and analytics to the field (pun intended). The transformation is coming just in time — the world’s expected population increase to 9 billion by 2050 will only amplify the challenge to agriculture to feed and nourish everyone in the face of dwindling arable land and water sources.

The digital reshaping of agriculture will bring heightened visibility and control. Using Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies can control an agricultural ecosystem at…