Ninghao Liu, assistant professor in the UGA School of Computing, has become the inaugural recipient of the Google Research Scholar Award at UGA.

Liu’s submission, titled “Enhancing Medical Knowledge in Multimodal Foundation Models through Self-Synthesized Data,” received $60,000 from the Google Research Scholar program following evaluations from multiple teams of Google engineers and researchers.

“This initiative investigates a novel framework aimed at improving medical comprehension within multi-modal AI systems that analyze both imagery and text,” Liu remarked. “Rather than depending on data that is labeled manually, it allows the model to create its own training data by sourcing medical knowledge and generating a variety of synthetic data samples. This self-generated data is subsequently utilized to refine the model, resulting in AI tools that are more precise, interpretable, and accessible to assist physicians in diagnosis and patient management.”

The Google Research Scholar Program aims to assist early-career academics engaged in research aligned with Google’s interests. The program offers unrestricted donations to support research at institutions across the globe.

The article Computing faculty member receives UGA’s first Google Research Scholar Award was first published on UGA Today.