News

Three teams of UMD researchers have received $650,000 each to help farmers improve production through better selective breeding or disease mitigation. The grants are part of a $13M investment by USDA NIFA, in AFRI’s Animals Growth and Lactation Program. The program promotes innovative work in cellular, molecular, genomic and whole-animal aspects of nutrition, growth and lactation.

The Army Research Lab has tapped the University of Maryland for an ambitious effort to integrate data science and engineering on a sweeping array of projects, ranging from a “smart nose” to sniff out hazardous materials to lightning-quick “fingerprinting” of cell phones and other radio-emitting devices. ARL, part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, recently awarded the A. James Clark School of Engineering a five-year, $78.2 million cooperative agreement to spearhead the Data Driven Engineering Research (DataDrivER) program.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made tremendous strides thanks to advances in machine learning and growing pools of data to learn from. Large language models (LLMs) and their derivatives, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s BERT, can now generate material that is increasingly similar to content created by humans. As a result, LLMs have become popular tools for creating high-quality, relevant and coherent text for a range of purposes, from composing social media posts to drafting academic papers.