HDR Institute: Imageomics: A new frontier of biological information powered by knowledge-guided machine learning

HDR Institute: Imageomics: A new frontier of biological information powered by knowledge-guided machine learning HDR Institute: Imageomics: A new frontier of biological information powered by knowledge-guided machine learning Dr. Nico Franz will serve as Principle Investigator for Arizona State University, committing 0.25 Summer months effort per year to this project. Specializing in biological systematics, biodiversity data science, and taxonomic intelligence, he will be responsible for facilitating and coordinating all HDR Institute Imageomics tasks involving ASU expertise and image/data contributions; including the co-production of use cases and applications involving the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Biorepository samples, and occurrences from other natural history collections in Symbiota portals hosted and co-managed by ASU's Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center (BioKIC). He will recruit and supervise BioKIC Facility Use contributions for on-demand image and data access. These services will include: identifying suitable image sets and associated (meta)data; newly generating such image datasets on demand; further processing and annotation of images and data in coordination with computer scientists' tool and analysis development; evaluation of results from the perspective of biologist (systematist) end users; and broader collaboration focused on optimizing the relationship between ML, ontology development and application, biological image data analysis and inference, and broader Imageomics impacts. He will thereby will collaborate broadly with the HDR institute on developing and publishing new methods, tools, data, and analyses; attend annual all-hands meetings; and present projects outcomes at other venues.