Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University

08/26/2026

08/21/2026

Principal investigators, faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff recently convened at the Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design Laboratory (AIMD-L) to discuss the future of AIMD-Net, newly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Programmable Cloud Laboratories network. The Hopkins-led team is one node among the network, which is dedicated to building a national group of remote-enabled and self-driving research laboratories. The AIMD-Net team discussed upcoming scientific, educational, and outreach efforts and met with working groups focused on advancing autonomous materials research. This effort is helping to build the infrastructure—and the workforce—needed to reimagine how materials are investigated and discovered.

Collaborators:
HEMI - Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at Johns Hopkins University
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Northwestern University
University of Virginia
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Fordham University
Haverford College



AIMD-Net P*s:
Todd Hufnagel, David Elbert, Michael Shields, Benjamin Van Durme, Wei Chen

08/18/2026

Two research teams of Hopkins engineers will collaborate with Philips North America and Kitware on projects newly-funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).

One project, led by Axel Krieger will develop autonomous control and navigation of an powered robotic device to aid clinicians in performing surgical procedures that remove stroke-causing clots from the .

Another team led by Mattias Unberath will create virtual simulations and validation testing on four solutions for stroke.

“Our Johns Hopkins teams are working with leading medical device and software companies on innovative solutions for a condition that is fatal too often,” says Krieger. “We bring a very skilled set of expertise to develop the solutions.”

https://engineering.jhu.edu/news/johns-hopkins-engineers-partner-with-industry-to-develop-ai-powered-robotic-stroke-treatment/

08/13/2026

This summer’s speech and language technology workshop ( ), hosted by the Center for Language and Speech Processing, moved to the collaborative research stage. Scientists and students from institutions around the world formed three interdisciplinary teams to advance several projects, including:

🔤 🎤️ multimodal AI, which integrates many types of data, such as text, images and audio, at once,

💬 spoken conversational systems, such as text-to-speech and chatbots,

🩺 and uncertainty-aware health coaching, which uses machine learning tools that acknowledge when the model doesn’t have enough information to provide guidance.



Read about the projects and stay tuned for the workshop’s wrap-up:
https://engineering.jhu.edu/ece/news/jsalt-2026-research-teams-explore-multimodal-ai-conversational-systems-and-trustworthy-health-coaching/?utm_campaign=wse_social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

08/06/2026

Genomics news: Scientists have reconstructed the complete genome of a real person, with full sets of chromosomes from each parent, a feat that establishes the most complete and highest quality human genome sequence ever constructed, filling critical gaps.

The findings are expected to advance research, improve the diagnosis of genetic diseases, and make personalized genomics routine in medical care.

The team sequenced the HG002 human genome, a sample from a living donor that is widely used as a reference material by the DNA sequencing and diagnostics industries. With near perfect accuracy, each chromosome spans from "telomere to telomere" and reveals 15% more of the genome, including previously inaccessible portions that are relevant to cancer and neurological disorders.

The team was led by Adam Phillippy, a research professor in the Johns Hopkins University Computer Science department, Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering, and the Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Genetic Medicine.

Read the story in the Hub to learn the full scope of the research team’s efforts.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2026/08/06/complete-human-genome-johns-hopkins/?utm_campaign=wse_social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

08/05/2026

A new website will track the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases across the United States to offer the public, the media, healthcare providers, public health officials, and policymakers reliable and visual information about current disease trends.

The U.S. Disease Tracker will initially monitor cases of measles, meningitis and pertussis (whooping cough), and later be expanded to include other vaccine-preventable diseases.

The tracker builds on and complements the CDC ’s national disease surveillance infrastructure by providing open access data that is timely, detailed and designed for broad audiences.

The tracker was created and run by Johns Hopkins University, ASTHO, and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, in partnership with state and territorial public health agencies.

Read the full story in the Johns Hopkins University Hub:
https://hub.jhu.edu/2026/08/05/us-disease-tracker-johns-hopkins/


Johns Hopkins Department of Civil and Systems Engineering
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

07/31/2026

This year’s speech and language technology workshop (JSALT2026) has brought 50 researchers and students from around the world to tackle challenges in multimodal , conversational systems, and technology. Stay tuned to how they solve this year’s set of challenges at the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing.

https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/2026/06/17/annual-engineering-workshop-that-spurred-advances-in-collaboration-across-speech-and-language-research-takes-on-ai-and-other-new-technologies/?utm_campaign=wse_social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

07/29/2026

In 2021, a fractured fan blade in the engine of an aircraft traveling from Denver to Honolulu caused a fire and engine failure. Now, Hopkins civil and systems engineers are studying how to predict metal fatigue using physics-based modeling, machine learning and other tools.

“We’re advancing the frontier in this area, and the results could be significant,” says engineer Somnath Ghosh. “Industry participation is telling that this technology is directly translatable to users for substantial gains. Our study is a demo case, but it doesn’t end there. We’ve shown that this is a meaningful way of coupling AI with physics-based models and that holds great promise for future investments at federal and industry levels.”

Read about their new prognosis tool, which predicts changes that happen over time due to repetitive use and prolonged loading, as well as the location of fatigue failure before it happens.

The image shows a schematic of an angular segment in a jet engine’s compressor disk.



https://engineering.jhu.edu/case/news/engineers-develop-a-new-predictive-tool-for-fatigue-failure-in-engineering-components/

07/22/2026

With a new $20 million grant over four years, Johns Hopkins University engineers will help build a network of “self-driving” laboratories powered by robotic tools and artificial intelligence guidance.

The grant is part of a total $380 million announced today by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to link such autonomous laboratories into a network capable of cooperating on some of society’s most pressing problems.

The new program, called AIMD-Net, will develop AI tools and data infrastructure for the network, along with a specific scientific focus on development of advanced materials.

“Now, we can use AI to guide and inform our experiments to test new materials with a far more rapid pace, precision and larger scale than ever before,” says Todd Hufnagel, director of the Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design Laboratory in the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute.



https://engineering.jhu.edu/news/building-better-materials-for-extreme-conditions-gets-20-million-boost-at-johns-hopkins-engineering/

07/20/2026

The award recognizes his work on UNet++, now the most cited paper in the journal’s recent history and a standard tool in medical image analysis.