IMFD research project receives Google Latin American Research Award (LARA)

The eighth edition of Google Research's Latin America Research Awards selected 22 frontier research projects from various Latin American countries for funding.

In the case of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, the work recognized is that carried out by Dustin Cobas, PhD researcher, and Gonzalo Navarro, research associate of our institute, both from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile. Their work, which investigates practical and flexible indexes in repetitive string collections, had already received this recognition in 2019.

For Navarro, "it is a great honor to have been chosen again. Dustin's thesis project is framed within research on how to efficiently manipulate large text collections, which are growing faster than the computational resources available to us and threaten to flood us with data (the phenomenon is sometimes called the Data Delugehe explained.

"We are being flooded with data but not with information, being that the key to face the challenge," said the academic, who explained that through this project "we want to be able to store this information in a space proportional to the amount of information that is actually stored, but in a way that everything works as if we had it stored flat. In particular, we focus on forms of storage that allow direct access to any element, and to perform searches on them, without ever decompressing them, only simulating that we have them physically decompressed", he remarked.

In a year marked by the covid-19 pandemic, the promotion of academic research in areas related to technology and innovation became more relevant as they allow solving more and more problems on a global scale. That is why among the 22 winning proposals, five are related to covid-19, while the rest are Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for the health sector and machine learning, among others.

The winners include two from Chile, thirteen from Brazil, four from Argentina, one from Peru, one from Colombia and one from Mexico, covering topics ranging from classifying skin lesions to identify types of cancer to detecting breeding sites of Aedes aegypti, which can transmit diseases such as Zika.

The other locally recognized project is that of Felipe Tobar, an academic at the Mathematical Modeling Center, and Jouhui Ho, a master's thesis student at the School of Electrical Engineering, both from the University of Chile, with research on detection of neonatal seizures using electroencephalography (EEG): a continuous and multichannel approach.

Source: Communications Team, Universidad de Chile https://www.uchile.cl/noticias/171377/equipos-de-la-u-de-chile-fueron-destacados-por-google-en-concurso