At a ceremony at the Earl and Christy Powell University House, UF Artificial Intelligence and Informatics Research Institute (AIIRI) honored Dr. Adrian Roitberg, Dr. Kiley Graim, and Dr. Jeremy Balch with the first-ever AI Research Awards, recognizing groundbreaking work that demonstrates how artificial intelligence is transforming science, medicine and engineering.

Read more about UF Celebrates Three Innovators Shaping the Future of AI Research.

Their work, led by Kiley Graim, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, focuses on improving human health by addressing “ancestral bias” in genetic data, a problem that arises when most research is based on data from a single ancestral group. This bias limits advancements in precision medicine, Graim said, and leaves large portions of the global population underserved when it comes to disease treatment and prevention. 

To solve this, the team developed PhyloFrame, a machine-learning tool that uses artificial intelligence to account for ancestral diversity in genetic data. With funding support from the National Institutes of Health, the goal is to improve how diseases are predicted, diagnosed, and treated for everyone, regardless of their ancestry. A paper describing the PhyloFrame method and how it showed marked improvements in precision medicine outcomes was published Monday in Nature Communications.