ASU’s AI team finishes third in international competition

The AI (Artificial Intelligence) Group at Arkansas State University finished third in the Multiple Myeloma DREAM Challenge, a machine-learning competition, according to ASU. The research group competed against 290 teams in the international competition. Their submission was statistically tied with the first place awardees.

Members of the ASU AI group are computer science faculty members Dr. Xiuzhen Huang, Dr. Jason Causey and Dr. Jake Qualls, along with senior scientist Dr. Wei Dong. Huang was introduced in December as an Arkansas Research Alliance Fellow for 2019.

The DREAM Challenge was organized by Celgene, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF), and Sage Bionetworks. The ASU AI group learned about the competition from professional collaborators.

“We entered the competition to train our team and to keep up with the most advanced AI and machine learning technologies,” Qualls said. “We were also interested in gauging our approach and abilities against other international teams.”

Additionally, the research group met the requirements for inclusion in the Multiple Myeloma Challenge consortium author list.

The competition results did not reveal the affiliations, only the team names. The ASU team name was ARMM, for Arkansas Multiple Myeloma. ARMM ranked above identifiable groups from the University of Michigan, New York University, and Stanford University.

The goal of the DREAM Challenge is to speed up the development and evaluation of precise risk stratification models to assist in the therapeutic decision-making and research for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow. About 25,000 new cases are discovered each year in the United States alone.

The DREAM Challenge name originated with the acronym for Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods.