UND Genome Sequencing Expert Can Help Geologists

(Photo courtesy North Dakota Geological Society via UND Today)

(UND Today) – It was a vexing problem: how to transfer reams of decades-old data to modern platforms. “By using artificial intelligence,” smiled Damien Parrello. “And I can do that.”

Earlier this year, the North Dakota Geological Survey (NDGS) reached out to the manager of the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences Genomics Core with a question: how could geologists move geological core sample data embedded in print materials from the 1950s into electronic spreadsheets in 2025? And do so efficiently.

“People had been extracting data by hand,” the French-born Parrello explained of the thousand-plus scanned documents that NDGS staff had been working on one-at-a-time. “Transferring the data like that is very time consuming. And you can imagine the rate of error in doing it that way.”

So Parrello, whose UND-based core functions as a public resource for researchers of various disciplines across the state, explored various AI models to do such data entry for NDGS.