Since 2014, Professor Roger French has been involved with the “Data Science Collaboration in the Life Sciences and Engineering”, a partnership between Case Western Reserve University and Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.  Every August, French and other members of the project have held a two day symposium/workshop, alternating between Cleveland one year and Sendai the next.  

On March 12, a CWRU/Tohoku session will be held as part of a symposium that Tohoku is having with the National Taiwan University.  French will present a talk, “Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network for Performance Prediction of Photovoltaic Power Systems.”   He will speak about the use of spatiotemporal graph neural networks' to improve the prediction of PV power plant output. The talk focuses on the results of French’s research with Ahmad Karimi, who graduated from CWRU with his PhD in Fall 2020. Karimi is now a HPC Operational Data Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. 

The symposium will be held from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time via Zoom.  Professors Mehmet Koyuturk and Yinghui Wu of the computer and data science departments will also give oral presentations at the symposium.

Since the partnership began, French has been going to Tohoku about twice a year.  He was a visiting professor in Summer 2019, where he spent the semester in Japan teaching a course in applied data analysis to 22 Tohoku students in the university’s Graduate School of Information Science.

This ten year collaboration was formalized between the university presidents. Since the partnership began, a university level MOU was established, allowing PhD students to spend two months of their second year and six months of their fourth year at the partner university.  CWRU has had student and faculty exchanges, with Tohoku graduate students, postdocs and faculty as visitors in the SDLE Research Center.

 French is also a visiting Professor in Tohoku’s Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials and has served as a co-author on papers with Tohoku faculty.  Currently, French and computer science student Ben Pierce are doing a research study and journal article as an extension to a 2019 paper.  Additionally, he has visited National Taiwan University and is fluent in Spanish.