Computing faculty member receives UGA's first Google Research Scholar Award

Ninghao Liu, assistant professor in the UGA School of Computing, is UGA’s first Google Research Scholar Award recipient.

Liu's proposal, "Enhancing Medical Knowledge in Multimodal Foundation Models through Self-Synthesized Data," was awarded $60,000 by the Google Research Scholar program after review by several teams of Google engineers and researchers.

"The project explores a new framework to enhance medical understanding in multi-modality AI systems that process both images and text," Liu said. "Instead of relying on manually labeled data, it enables the model to generate its own training data by retrieving medical knowledge and creating diverse, synthetic data samples. This self-synthesized data is then used to fine-tune the model, leading to more accurate, explainable, and accessible AI tools to support doctors in diagnosis and patient care."

The Google Research Scholar Program is designed to support early career professors who are pursuing research in fields relevant to Google. The program provide unrestricted gifts to support research at institutions around the world and is focused.

The UGA School of Computing is jointly administered by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering. 

Image: Ninghao Liu.