Kaiping Chen and Min Chen are among nine campus PIs whose projects were awarded funding in the latest round of the American Family Funding Initiative, a unique sponsored research partnership between American Family Insurance and UW–Madison through the Data Science Institute. Kaiping Chen, assistant professor of life sciences communications, and Min Chen, assistant professor of forest and wildlife ecology, will receive a year of funding for data science research.

Kaiping Chen and co-PI Junjie Hu will address the need for advanced risk assessment in sectors like insurance, criminal justice and misinformation management by harnessing the power of Vision-Language Models for analyzing complex, multimodal data.

Min Chen will develop an innovative model to predict where and when wildfires are likely to occur, understand the complex factors that lead to wildfire events, and predict risks with greater accuracy.

American Family Insurance has committed $10 million over 10 years to support UW–Madison research with potential to fuel discovery in data science, while creating value for industry and society. Since its launch in spring 2020, 40 teams of UW–Madison faculty and collaborators have been awarded nearly six million dollars through this internal funding competition.

A seventh round of funding will be announced in January 2025. Project summaries and PI bios are available at the data science @ uw website.