Machine Learning Workforce Development Programs on Health and COVID-19 Research

This paper accompanies the keynote speech at IISA2020 and describes federally funded workforce development research grants and supplements in the area of sensors and machine learning. These programs operate under the auspices of the Sensor Signal and Information Processing (SenSIP) center which is also an Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and I/UCRC industry members. The first program is an NSF REU site which has trained more than 30 students working on sensor hardware design and machine learning algorithm development. The second program is the NSF IRES site which is collaborative with the University of Cyprus and is focused on sensors and machine learning for energy systems. The most recent program funded by NSF is a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program that started in June 2020. This program embeds teachers and community college faculty in SenSIP machine learning projects. Another state funded program in which SenSIP is a partner is MedTech ventures. Our partner MedTech works on training medical technology students, entrepreneurs and engineers to create smart medical solutions for preventive healthcare. SenSIP also received NSF supplements to train students in using machine learning for COVID-19 detection.