L’intelligence artificielle – UND Today

Source Domain: blogs.und.edu

Damien Parrello’s AI skills mean the UND genome-sequencing expert can help another North Dakota research team — namely, geologists

Damien Parrello (left), UND’s Genomics Core manager, lends a hand to another North Dakota researcher. Photo courtesy North Dakota Geological Society.

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the Holiday 2025 edition of North Dakota Medicine, the quarterly magazine produced by the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

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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 UND 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.

“What I did is develop the tool to automate everything – I was able just to feed the tool with all the scanned documents from the fifties,” Parrello continued. “The tool will go into each page, recognize the table I want to extract the data from, put it in a spreadsheet, and name it with the right information.”

After identifying the appropriate AI model to read scans from old publications that include data on North Dakota counties, such as…

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