News

Delivery Drones and Rotor-Powered Rideshares Sound Great—and Noisy
Combining expertise in mechanical engineering, fluid mechanics, and urban hydrology, BU researchers with NASA funding will lead a multimillion-dollar, multi-institution project to help develop quieter vertical lift air vehicles More

Learning From Animal Behaviors to Inform Control Systems
Research by Distinguished Professor of Engineering John Bailleul questions how animals operate and how you might use animal behaviors to design control systems. By Margo Stanton You... More

Extraordinary Control: Professor Paschalidis Elected IFAC Fellow
Recognition of his work on control of network systems, optimization and robust learning. test More

Christine Ritzkowski Elected to Academic Resilience Consortium Steering Committee
Our own Divisions Graduate Programs Manager, Christine Ritzkowski has just been elected to the Academic Resilience Consortium (ARC) Steering Committee. ARC is "an association of faculty, More

Professor Ayse Coskun appointed Director of CISE
Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) has been named the next Director of the Boston University Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). Coskun will replace Yannis... More

Sabelhaus Research: Advancing the Safety of Soft Robots for Human Interactions
The emergence of soft robots will enable safe human interactions which will allow robots to assist in the industrial, medical, automotive and space industries. College of Engineering Professor Andrew Sabelhaus (ME, SE), has been working on making soft robots safer to improve these human interaction tasks, in areas such as medicine, as well as explore difficult or dangerous locations. His work will help improve the design of many other soft robots. More

Could a Computer Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia?
Researchers at Boston University have developed a new tool that could automate the process and, eventually, allow it to move online. Their machine learning–powered computational model can detect cognitive impairment from audio recordings of neuropsychological tests—no in-person appointment needed. More

Ioannis Paschalidis New Director of Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering
The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering will have a new director as of July 1. Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE), a College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering and of computing and data sciences, will oversee the institute’s move into a new, eye-arresting building (the largest on the Charles River Campus), the Center for Computing & Data Sciences. More

ENG Wins MassTech Grant to Build Robotics Lab
The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has awarded a $4.4 million grant to the College of Engineering to construct a new robotics lab focusing on graduate education at the master’s degree level. Boston University is contributing another $4.4 million, bringing the overall investment to $8.8 million over three years. The grant will fund the development of the Robotics & Autonomous Systems Teaching & Innovation Center (RASTIC), a hands-on robotics teaching facility that is expected to complement the College’s master’s degree program in Robotics & Autonomous Systems and enhance robotics capstone experiences for undergraduate students. More

Pregnancy Models Give Birth To New Health Insights
Having a baby is a life-changing decision that often requires a great deal of time and energy to ensure a positive outcome. But the cost... More

Cross-disciplinary research teams win Kilachand funding
Five Studies Pushing the Limits of Science: This year’s Kilachand fund awards will support pioneering research across engineering and life sciences More

Three Awarded Career Development Professorships
Three assistant professors have earned professorships that recognize future leaders in their fields, Boston University Provost Jean Morrison has announced. Abdoulaye Ndao was named the... More

Balancing electricity demands and costs of high-performance computing
Hariri asked Coskun and Daniel Wilson about HPC and sustainable computing programs. More

Three ENG Faculty Promoted
Three College of Engineering faculty have been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure “Each year, these promotions and awards of tenure mark an... More

5 Projects That Push the Limits of Physics, Fabrication Techniques, Algorithm Design
Two engineering professors among the NSF CAREER award recipients: William Boley and Francesco Orabona. Each will receive funding to advance their areas of research for the next five years. More

BU Launches Data Science as an Undergraduate Major
SE Prof launches Center for Computing & Data Sciences course of study this fall. More

Start-Up Stars
Two ENG alumni are on Forbes’ list of top young entrepreneurs By Patrick L. Kennedy If you’re a frequent flyer, you’ve been there. At the airport, eyes... More

Paschalidis Shares Health Data Findings in DeLisi Lecture
Professor Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE) discussed data-driven reasoning—which he calls “the backbone of engineering systems”—and predictive health analytics as he delivered the Charles DeLisi... More

How to Create Safe, Energy-Efficient Buildings in a Post-Covid World
BU Innovators Address New Requirements of Commercial Real Estate by Maya Bhat & Maureen Stanton, CISE Staff Smart building technology has been a growing trend in the... More
Congratulations to the CISE Best Student Paper Award Winners
The Center for Information of Systems and Engineering is delighted to announce the winners of the 2021 CISE Best Student Paper Award. The CISE Best... More

One Small Step For A Mouse: Using Information Science to Understand the Brain
by Allison Kleber How does learning a new skill or process change the physical structure of the brain? Using techniques from data science and high-dimensional statistics, More

‘Happy and Proud,’ Declares Dissertation Award Recipient
Alumnus Update: 2020 SE Dissertation Award Winner Ruidi Chen By Emily Sorkin As an applied scientist at Microsoft, alumnus Ruidi Chen (SE PhD ’19) has already established herself as... More

Francesco Orabona wins CAREER award for work on machine learning
Assistant Professor Francesco Orabona (ECE, SE, CS) won the National Science Foundation CAREER award for his work on new, more automated, machine learning algorithms. Machine learning... More
Machine, Meet Stem Cells
By Sarah Williams for Gladstone Institutes Model organs grown from patients’ own cells may one day revolutionize how diseases are treated. A person’s cells, coaxed into... More

Spring 2021 CISE-ENG Seed Awards Winners
By Margo Stanton Four Spring 2021 Seed Grants were awarded by the Boston University Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE) and the College of Engineering’s (ENG)... More

How Fitbits, Other Bluetooth Devices Make Us Vulnerable to Tracking
BU researchers found that a third-party algorithm can track the location of some Bluetooth devices By Sarah Wells (COM '18) for BU Today In 2018, nearly 3.7... More

PhD Candidate Wins Best Paper Award at IEEE CDC
SE PhD candidate Wei Xiao is the first author on a paper titled “Feasibility-Guided Learning for Constrained Optimal Control Problems.” The piece was published in Proceedings of 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and earned the Outstanding Student Paper Award. More

COVID-19 Risk Assessment to Address Inequity
This article was written by Eliza Shaw (CISE), videos produced by SE. Informing Policy, Resource Allocation and Workplace Adjustment Policies https://youtu.be/rC0HC-YhFbA Video Part 1: Researching the risk of COVID-19 relates... More

$3 Million for Transformational Energy Technology
"NewRAMP will develop innovative approaches that quantify the risk of individual Electric-Power-Grid-interconnected assets based on their performance and ability to deliver market cleared capacity and energy,” explains Prof. Caramanis. “By synthesizing ideas and theories from finance and insurance, operations research, power system engineering and electricity market design, NewRAMP will offer ground-breaking methodologies constituting a risk-driven paradigm to achieve higher adoption of stochastic resources and a more efficient and reliable system operation. As such, it will contribute to reducing imported energy, reducing energy-related emissions, and improving energy efficiency.” More

Five ECE Faculty are 2020 Spring Research Incubation Awardees
The Hariri Institute for Computing announced their 2020 Spring Research Incubation Awards to faculty who have the potential to define new areas of research; five ECE faculty members are authors or co-authors of these incubation projects. More

Hua Wang Supporting the COVID-19 Frontline in Wuhan and Massachusetts
One Professor's Extraordinary Extracurriculars Professor Hua Wang was interviewed by Ross Cristantiello for Lexington Wicked Local. Professor Hua Wang has been organizing local residents to combat COVID-19 since... More

Game Changer: Azer Bestavros’ Journey from Egypt to Cambridge to BU’s Computing Mastermind
“Technology is not creative; people are creative,” says the new associate provost for computing and data sciences. By Art Jahnke, originally featured on The Brink. In December... More

Advancing Smart Cities with the Internet of Cars
Inadequate systems to manage the traffic at road intersections are at the root of most car accidents and traffic jams. Autonomous vehicles are being developed to address these traffic management issues. Cassandras' team is revamping their proposed solution by extending earlier research on optimally controlling autonomous cars crossing an urban intersection. More

Assistive Technologies
Teaching robots to cook. More

Eric Kolaczyk Named New Director of BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering
“Data science and computing are now embedded in the human experience and informing everything we do,” CAS math professor says By Doug Most Originally featured on The... More

Moths Teach Drones to Fly
Research is first to apply animal data to autonomous vehicle navigation More

Aerial Drones Get Schooled in Navigation by Moths
BU researchers observed how moths navigate forests to improve control programs for autonomous aerial drones By Kerry Benson Originally featured on The Brink A rather unusual situation recently... More
Robot Reinforcement
A team of researchers led by Professor Calin Belta has developed a new machine-learning framework to teaching a robot, or a team of robots, a high-risk, complex task—a framework that could be applied to a host of tasks. More

Security and Privacy Experts Uncover Hidden Threats You Need to Know About
BU Today, Molly O'Brien Gluck Approximately 70 percent of Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, and share information. Most users access social... More
NEXTCAR Self-driving Car in Action Advances the Future Internet of Cars
By Maureen Stanton and Eliza Shaw for CISE First On-Road Demonstration of BU-developed Algorithms Traffic congestion around the world is worsening, according to transport data firm INRIX. More

BU-Harvard Team Wins $1.2M NSF Grant to Improve Women’s Reproductive Health using AI and Machine Learning
Researchers to advance distributed analytics to enhance fertility in families More

Multiplication by Divisions
Fuel cell use could be one of the best ways to mitigate climate change—fuel cells work like batteries, provide efficient power and don’t emit air pollutants. But there are multiple barriers in research and development before they will be available to a commercial market. Professor Soumendra Basu (ME, MSE) has been working on fuel cells, but, along with everyone else, was stymied by one of those barriers: the material used on the cell’s cathode was unstable and subject to decomposition. For help, he reached out to Professor Karl Ludwig in the Physics Department. More
The College of Engineering Announces Three Distinguished Faculty Fellows
Associate Professor James C. Bird (ME, MSE) will be the inaugural holder of the Theo de Winter Distinguished Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil (BME) will be the next holder of the Dorf-Ebner Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor Bobak Nazer (ECE, SE) will be the next holder of the College of Engineering Distinguished Faculty Fellow. More

Smart Vehicles
Advancing smart drones and cars. More

Know what’s good for your health? Artificial intelligence
A generation ago, the internet changed everything. Today, data science is proving just as revolutionary. Fueled by the abundance of personal information on the internet—yours, ours, everyone’s—data science is making business smarter, healthcare more efficient, technology easier, and sports more fun to watch (and play). More

What If We Could Stop Lung Cancer Before It Starts?
BU and Johnson & Johnson Innovation alliance discovers why an immune system boost could prevent lung cancer By Sara Rimer in BU Today Genomic differences related to... More

How to Make Self-Driving Vehicles Smarter, Bolder
Autonomous vehicles that can maneuver themselves around any city are already out on our public roads, says Yannis Paschalidis, but operating off-road remains a challenge. Paschalidis is testing a new self-driving vehicle with the goal of correcting that problem. These vehicles can operate on and off-road. “We are interested in developing fundamental principles that can be applied to autonomous vehicles capable of navigating themselves on the ground, underwater, and in the air,” he says. More

BU-led Research Team Wins Competitive $7.5 million MURI Grant to Create Neuro-Autonomous Robots
Dream Team of Engineers, Computer Scientists, and Neuroscientists from BU, MIT, and Australia to develop neuro-inspired capabilities for Land, Sea, and Air-based Autonomous Robots More

State Representative Tackling Societal Challenges
Massachusetts State Representative Vitolo earned Bachelor's Degrees of Science in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Economics. His aptitude for solving mathematical applications and drive to address community problems led him towards operation research. At Boston University, he connected the dots. In 2011, he graduated from BU with a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering and the know-how to make a difference in the world. More

Highway US-33 – Honda and Cassandras Team Up
Self-driving smart cars used to be something that was seen in the movies; an idea that was too far away to even consider a possible... More