Travis Mandel, Associate Professor of Computer Science

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Associate Professor Mandel is an expert in Human-In-the-Loop Artificial Intelligence, a data-driven process that improves models and algorithms through human intervention and contribution to create better and more accurate AI.

Travis Mandel pictured.
Travis Mandel

Posted July 11, 2024

Travis Mandel is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. He is an expert in Human-In-the-Loop Artificial Intelligence (AI), a data-driven process that improves models and algorithms through human intervention and contribution to create better and more accurate AI.

Mandel earned his bachelor of science in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctor of philosophy in computer science at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

He arrived at UH Hilo in 2017 and received tenure in 2022.

In his research, Mandel asks the question, “How do we create AI systems that work effectively with human teammates to achieve better results than either could individually?” This area of research lies at the intersection of two fields: AI and Human-Computer Interaction or HCI.

“I am particularly interested in exploring how AI can most effectively work together with human scientists, identifying and addressing common problems that arise in a number of different scientific domains,” he explains on his website. “This has led me to do new work in the field of Computer Vision (CV) to meet the needs of Hawai‘i Island scientists who wish to extract important scientific data from images and video.”

In 2020 Mandel was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance this research agenda, and in 2022 he joined a statewide program funded by the National Science Foundation to help develop new Human-in-the-Loop AI techniques for climate science.

Mandel’s recent research includes published work in which he and his research team developed new computer vision algorithms that allow computers to track fish effectively from video feeds collected by real-world divers off of Hilo Bay. The algorithm outperformed a wide variety of competitors across multiple datasets. The researchers are now working on next steps, which are understanding how people actually interact with such systems. “We have built an Android app which runs a version of our tracker at near real-time on Android phones. We hope that this can be deployed underwater in the near future,” he says.

Inclusion of students

Associate Professor Mandel is known for exposing his students to real-world research in both computer science and data science. Opportunities for students to do hands-on research in these fields are not easily found on Hawaiʻi Island, but Mandel has changed that for students at UH Hilo.

Mandel’s inclusion of students in research is highly successful in guiding budding scientists to produce high-quality projects. In 2020, Mandel published a journal article at a top human-computer interaction journal co-authored with six UH Hilo undergraduates, and in 2021 he published a conference paper at a top AI conference co-authored with four UH Hilo undergraduates. Just recently, he published the journal article, “Detection confidence driven multi-object tracking to recover reliable tracks from unreliable detections,” in a top computer vision journal co-authored with another six UH Hilo undergraduate students.

Underwater images with areas marked off.
Image above shows new fish counting algorithm, developed by data scientist Travis Mandel and his students, is working well on video from Hilo Bay. The development of this AI algorithm was recently published in a top computer vision journal. (Courtesy photo from Travis Mandel)
App as seen on a smart phone.
Data scientist Travis Mandel and a team of UH Hilo students built a fish counting Android app that runs a version of an underwater tracker at near real-time on Android phones. (Courtesy photo from Travis Mandel)

In addition to his research and teaching with students, Mandel also is continuing to improve curriculum at UH Hilo through developing a data science major; data science is currently offered only as a certificate program. Data scientists solve challenging real-world problems in a variety of fields of study through collecting, analyzing, and visualizing complex datasets. It is a versatile field because almost every branch of science collects loads of data — big data — and has processes for analyzing all the information. These analytical skills are in  high demand in the workforce and also something many students find interesting. Mandel is hopeful the major will be offered soon.

The future

Looking to the future of his career, Mandel looks at AI contextually, seeing that the field continues to become more and more capable, achieving incredible feats such as generating professional-looking artwork or essentially solving the protein folding problem in biology. But, he observes, these advances have been driven by a massive amount of data, and there are a huge number of important problems where there is no data available yet.

“In these cases, the challenge becomes how to collect that data effectively, how to make the best use of human effort to label the data, and how to make AI systems that work as well as they can with such a small amount of data,” he explains. “All these things involve collaboration between the AI as well as humans who are making decisions about data collection, annotation, and policy. I am excited to continue to explore this exciting space of problems, forming new interdisciplinary collaborations while sustaining the existing ones.”

By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.