A new $8.16 million commitment to UMD honors the late Eugenia Brin, wife of mathematics Professor Emeritus Michael Brin and mother of Google co-founder Sergey Brin ’93 and Samuel Brin ’09. 

Making autonomous drones safer. Measuring how people express trust in AI. Helping local governments navigate AI policy. Those are among the ambitions driving five new research projects selected for the fourth round of seed funding from the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS).

A new approach to treating venomous snake bites uses the same toxin-blocking proteins that snakes evolved to protect themselves from their own venom, providing unprecedented neutralizing power against the venom of multiple dangerous snake species.

The University of Maryland will launch a test bed for users from across the U.S. to program automated workflows for experiments in biomanufacturing, which uses living organisms and cells rather than chemical or mechanical processes to create products. 

In a crisis, calculating the safest evacuation routes or deploying emergency resources typically requires significant computing power and specialized expertise. A UMD researcher is developing a cloud-based platform that helps anyone with a smartphone use advanced optimization to help make complex decisions.