{"id":161161,"date":"2025-03-26T14:06:48","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T18:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=161161"},"modified":"2025-03-26T14:08:41","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T18:08:41","slug":"honored-from-within","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2025\/03\/26\/honored-from-within\/","title":{"rendered":"Honored from Within"},"content":{"rendered":"

by A.J. Kleber<\/em><\/p>\n

As spring begins in earnest, let\u2019s take a look back at a winter that, for all Boston\u2019s chilly temperatures, was anything but barren when it comes to ECE researchers!<\/span><\/p>\n

Early Career Excellence in Research Award<\/h3>\n
\"Professor
Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAutonomy\u201d is a word that gets thrown around quite a lot in electrical and computer engineering, typically in reference to AI-driven technologies such as autonomous vehicles (otherwise known as self-driving cars), smart devices, and robotics. Assistant Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar\u2019s research certainly features this kind of autonomy; in fact, his contributions to AV system research, including situational and robust learning algorithms, have helped to define benchmarks in the field.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, Ohn-Bar\u2019s work concerns itself with another kind of autonomy as well: the human kind. A true societal engineer, much of his research focuses on inclusive design, assistive technology, and accessibility, exemplified in such projects as the \u201cOpenGuide\u201d guidance system for visually impaired travelers.<\/span><\/p>\n

This significant and impactful work has earned Professor Ohn-Bar an <\/span>Early Career Excellence in Research Award<\/span><\/a> from the Boston University College of Engineering. The award will be presented next week at the 2025 Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture event on Thursday, April 3.<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Ohn-Bar<\/span><\/a> joined Boston University in 2020. His accolades include a prestigious IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Best Dissertation Award, a Humboldt Research Fellowship, and a number of Best Paper Awards. His work is funded by the NSF and the Department of Transportation, among others.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dean\u2019s Infrastructure Award<\/h3>\n
\"Professor
Professor Roberto Paiella<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Professor Roberto Paiella<\/span><\/a> was among the inaugural recipients of the Boston University College of Engineering\u2019s newly-minted <\/span>Dean\u2019s Research Infrastructure Awards<\/span><\/a> (DRIA). Per College of Engineering Dean <\/span>ad interim<\/span><\/i> Elise Morgan, the awards are intended to provide faculty with the practical resources necessary to \u201ccarry out their bold ideas\u201d – with an emphasis on projects with the potential for significant societal impact.<\/span><\/p>\n

An optoelectronics specialist with a focus on quantum structures, nanophotonics and metasurfaces, Paiella is using his DRIA funds to support the development of a unique new camera designed for extreme miniaturization. The purchase of a tunable supercontinuum laser will provide vast new opportunities for experimentation and testing.<\/span><\/p>\n

AI Research Resource Program Awards<\/h3>\n

In 2024, the Boston University Office of Research and the Hariri Institute for Computing established the <\/span>BU AI Research Resource Program<\/span><\/a> (BU-AIRR) to drive large-scale AI research by funding access to the <\/span>New England Research Cloud<\/span><\/a> (NERC)\u2019s impressive array of cloud computing resources.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of the twenty-six projects selected for BU-AIRR support, almost half are helmed by ECE faculty, with applications ranging from medical research, to energy-efficient computing, to improving and developing training methods for AI systems themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Professor Kayhan Batmanghelich<\/span><\/a> is working on two projects with a tight focus on medical AI in clinical settings: one to develop an anatomically and biomechanically informed generative foundational model for lung CT images, and another to create a multi-modal foundational model to improve scalability and equitability in breast cancer detection and risk prediction.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"In collaboration with a number of her ECE colleagues, <\/span>Professor Ayse Coskun<\/span><\/a>\u2019s two BU-AIRR-supported projects involve practical, and crucial, improvements for cloud computing: one to automate security operations, and another to advance energy-efficiency and sustainability for High-Performance Computing systems and data centers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"ProfessorA pair of <\/span>Professor Wenchao Li<\/span><\/a>\u2019s projects to improve learning and training received support for the study of task alignment and multi-task generalization in Decision Transformers (with applications to offline reinforcement training), and the development of novel uncertainty quantification methods to improve the reliability of vision-language models in automatic radiology report generation, respectively.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"In collaboration with members of the Computer Science faculty, <\/span>Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar<\/span><\/a> is investigating effective continual learning approaches for LLMs, especially in multi-modal settings, to reduce the need for re-training models from scratch in order to enhance scalability and resource efficiency.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Professor Venkatesh Saligrama<\/span><\/a> is partnering with Professor Boqing Gong (CS) on projects headed by each of them: an effort to utilize video data from the perspective of young children to investigate language and vision-related learning techniques for efficient, developmentally plausible AI systems, and another towards democratizing research on the pretraining of foundation models to invite contributions from a wider field of researchers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"Professor David Starobinski<\/span><\/a> is engineering graph-based methods for the automation of cybersecurity operations, while <\/span>Professor Gianluca Stringhini<\/span><\/a> is using Learning to Rank techniques, LLMs, and image processing to create a multi-modal decision agent for identifying social media content for moderation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Leveraging the Boston University Alzheimer\u2019s Disease Research Center (ADRC) Digital Pathology Core, the world\u2019s largest digital neuropathology database, <\/span>Professor Lei Tian<\/span><\/a> is developing the first neuropathology-specific foundation model for the purpose of advancing our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

College and University Shower Awards on ECE Faculty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18241,"featured_media":161162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,257,1046,1170,325,287,385,318,317,977,240,907,1162,1073,1137,1066,1114,1165,1155],"tags":[1315,1316,1314,850,431,752,793,372,1105],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161161"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161169,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161161\/revisions\/161169"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}