Md. Saiful Islam is one of the recipients of the Google PhD fellowship for health AI research.

The Google Ph.D. Fellowship Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields.

Md. Saiful Islam is interested in multimodal machine learning (i.e., joint modeling textual, acoustic, and visual modalities) and its applications to healthcare. In particular, he is working on enabling neurological care available anytime, anywhere, using computer vision. Imagine anyone from any part of the world turning on their webcam, and performing neurological tests to screen for movement disorders or measure the severity of their tremors. You can learn more about the project at https://roc-hci.com/current-projects/park-parkinsons-analysis-with-remote-kinetic-tasks/

This work is being done in collaboration with the neurology department of the University of Rochester Medical Center. His clinical collaborators include Jamie Adams; Ray Dorsey, the David M. Levy Professor of Neurology; and associate professor Ruth Schneider.  His PhD advisor is Ehsan Hoque.

You can learn more about this year’s recipients at https://research.google/outreach/phd-fellowship/recipients/

A recent press release on Saiful’s work is at https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ai-test-for-parkinsons-disease-severity-566772/