Group Members

Kevin Chu

Projects: PXRD, Quantitative Spectrometry, DermaML, PreML

Nicole Tin

Project: DermaML

Akilan Paramasivam

Velexi Research Scholar (2024, 2025)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Projects: PreML, OTSPDE

PreML. This project aims to use information theory to predict the learnability of a dataset by analyzing its features and its target variable. We compared information theory quantities like mutual information to the accuracies of trained models, and the results show that a relationship exists between them.

Sonya Patel

Velexi Research Scholar / IMSA Summer Research and Internship Opportunities (2025)

Mentor(s): Nicole Tin

Project: Exploring Color Spaces for Skin Tone Characterization

This project aims to quantify skin tone variation for use in digital dermatologic assessments.

Laksh Patel

Velexi Research Scholar / IMSA Summer Research and Internship Opportunities (2025)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Dictionary Learning for Classifying Functional Groups in Raw IR Spectra Data of Organic Molecules

This project focuses on applying unsupervised learning to raw infrared (IR) spectra in order to automatically identify and classify moledcular functional groups in organic molecules.

Harrison Jang

Velexi Research Scholar / IMSA Summer Research and Internship Opportunities (2025)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Quantitative analysis method for FTIR spectra based on Random Projection Sparse Signatures

The research centers around the use of Infrared Spectrometry in order to determine the chemical bonds of an unknown or known material. By projecting infrared light through these bonds, some of the light either gets absorbed or passed through which is gathered by a detector. Using the data and intensity collected, we must determine what variable is appropriate in order to translate the data into a xy graph. The end goal is to code a program in which it can read an infrared spectrometry data file and translate the variables to determine the amount of composition a compound is made of using the already known bonds that we’ve determined earlier.

Atharv Kanchi

Velexi Research Scholar (2025)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Enhancing PXRD Indexing with Genetic Algorithms

Evelyn Chu

Velexi Research Scholar (2025)

Mentor(s): Keagan Chee (Ning Research), Raphael Tan (Ning Research), Kevin Chu

Project: Assessing the Accuracy of FEA Vibration Simulations using Physical Experiments

Sofia Kwee

Project: DermaML

Hannah Zhang

Velexi Research Scholar (2023)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Application of Machine Learning for Hand Age Prediction (DermaML)

The goal of this project is to develop machine learning software that detects hand age from image data collected by the University of Iowa faculty and staff. An emphasis was placed on feature engineering and understanding the mechanisms behind which the machine learning model(s) obtained results.

April Zhang

Velexi Research Scholar (2022)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: DermaML

William Gvozdjak

Velexi Research Scholar (2021)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Geometric Algebra Software Project

In this project, I work on a geometric algebra library in the Julia programming language.

Hristo Todorov

Research Science Institute^* (2021)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Exploring Machine Learning Interpretability by Analyzing Tumor Suppressor Genetic Sequence Data

With the application of machine learning techniques to various fields (e.g. speech synthesis, healthcare), the problem of interpretability is gaining importance. Genomics seems to be a promising field for building interpretable machine learning models. We created machine learning approaches for analyzing raw tumor suppressor genetic sequence data, focusing specifically on determining reference genes from randomly extracted k-mers, which is a challenging task due to the data sparsity. Our results suggest that the encoding of the input data has a strong impact on the representations the models learn and that SHAP values are a useful tool for interpreting the behavior of convolutional neural networks trained on limited genomics data.

* To help support Research Science Institute (RSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Velexi hosted several RSI projects remotely.

Jackson Flowers

Research Science Institute^* (2020)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Using Geometric Algebra to Estimate the Sparsity of Data and the Size of the Minimal Overcomplete Basis for Data through Observations

We examined datasets comprised of unions of linear subspaces, with the goal of bounding the minimum number of vectors needed to sparsely represent the data. We developed a procedure that results in a bound for this number in the case where the dimensions of these subspaces are distinct, and we found a number of bounds for this number given the dimensions of each of the subspaces.

* To help support Research Science Institute (RSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Velexi hosted several RSI projects remotely.

Srikar Munukutla

Velexi Research Scholar (2019, 2020)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Machine Learning Approaches for Analysis of Reflectance Spectra

Verona Teo

Velexi STEAM Practicum (2020)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Financial Analysis Automation Tools for Value Investors

This project aims to develop an explicit model or formula for the valuation of companies and stocks with the hopes of providing investors with automated stock suggestions and investment strategies.

Luke Bemish

Research Science Institute^* (2020)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Modifications of Földiák’s Algorithm for Imbalanced Data

* To help support Research Science Institute (RSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Velexi hosted several RSI projects remotely.

Marvin Li

Research Science Institute^* (2020)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu, Teck Leong Tan (IHPC, Singapore)

Project: Machine Learning Driven Design of Catalysts for the Water Gas Shift Reaction

In this project, I use a machine learning drive approach to find novel catalysts with desirable properties for the Water Gas Shift Reaction.

* To help support Research Science Institute (RSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Velexi hosted several RSI projects remotely.

Sabrina Bonifacio

Velexi STEAM Practicum (2019)

Mentor(s): Kevin Chu

Project: Machine Learning Applications in Python