The Ismagilov lab submitted a White Paper in October 2024 and was subsequently invited to an in-person Pitch Day in Washington D.C. Professor Rustem Ismagilov and postdoc Matt Cooper attended and were awarded a $200k award following their pitch presentation.

The Ismagilov lab was responding to a solicitation of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) aiming to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) innovations to BTO. The program’s goal is to catalyze future efforts in the topics of Prediction and Health, Autonomous Science, Simulation, Biomanufacturing and Synthetic Biology, Challenges with Scale, and Frontier topics through the generation and processing of data sets.

Matt is developing new experimental and computational technologies to dramatically improve data quality to feed AI models.

Their DARPA project for this 6-month pilot will demonstrate that the technologies Matt is developing can improve the training of (and inference with) predictive AI models in the context of sequencing, which is high impact for biological research and medical diagnostics.