Three Hariri Institute Faculty Affiliates Receive NSF CAREER Awards
By Maureen Stanton, Hariri Institute for Computing
Hariri Institute Faculty Affiliates Renato Mancuso (CAS, Computer Science), Hadi Nia (ENG, Biomedical Engineering), and Alyssa Pierson (ENG, Mechanical Engineering) have each received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.
These NSF grants are among the most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Learn more about their research below!
Renato Mancuso is assistant professor of computer science, affiliated faculty of electrical and computer engineering, and director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Lab (CPSLab@BU) at Boston University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The mission of the CPSLab is to rethink and re-design when, how, and where computation happens in multi-core, heterogeneous, and dynamically re-reconfigurable embedded systems. The research leverages advanced embedded technology to deliver solid foundations for the development of next-generation cyber-physical systems, including self-driving cars, green-energy UAVs, machine-learning-enabled robotics controllers, IoT and edge-cloud devices.
In this NSF CAREER award, Mancuso’s research will focuses on turning timeliness into a dimension that can be directly and explicitly managed in high-performance platforms. It does so by recognizing the importance of gathering and acting upon precise knowledge about the low-level interplay between software and hardware components. Systemic paradigms to collect, retain, and leverage such knowledge are studied, with a specific focus on practical technology that can be immediately employed on commercial platforms. The project also includes educational activities to introduce timeliness as a fundamental design-time dimension in computer science curricula, with a number of outreach activities designed for pre-college students to explore challenges in time-sensitive systems.
Earlier this spring, Mancuso received the Boston University 2023 Gitner Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology.
Hadi Nia is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, affiliated faculty of material science and engineering, and principal investigator of the Nia Laboratory at Boston University. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital. The Nia Lab’s overall research goal is to combine the principles of engineering and physical sciences with molecular biology to develop novel models and tools for imaging the lung in real-time and at the cellular resolution to probe the links between the lung physics, biology, and immunity in health and disease.
Nia will use his NSF CAREER award to advance foundational understanding of lung function including respiration, circulation, and immunity, at the cellular level and in real-time. The project will also integrate this research into an educational plan to train the next generation workforce in pulmonary biomechanics and mechanobiology. Central to this research is an innovation developed by the Nia Lab called crystal ribcage: a transparent, biocompatible platform designed to provide a physiological environment for a functioning lung ex vivo and allows the first truly multiscale optical imaging of the lung in health and disease. The crystal ribcage allows 3-D imaging over the entire surface of the lung, while uniquely combining the benefits of in vivo mouse models and in vitro organ-on-chip models.
Nia has received numerous awards for his work, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (given to only 72 awardees in the entire NIH community), a National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering Trailblazer Award, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the College of Engineering Early Career Research Excellence Award.
Alyssa Pierson is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the Collaborative Autonomy Group at Boston University. She is chief scientist at Ava Robotics. She received her PhD from Boston University and her postdoctoral training at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT CSAIL). Pierson’s research focuses on designing new capabilities for collaborative robotic teams by integrating trust, cooperation, and competition. Her research vision is to create teams of capable, collaborative robots that adapt to unknown agents and environments by engineering group autonomy. To achieve this, her work combines tools from social psychology, behavioral decision theory, nonlinear control, and game theory.
With this CAREER award, Pierson will investigate how to integrate underlying cooperation and interaction models into the design of a heterogeneous mobile robot team.Research on (1) reputation, (2) reciprocity, and (3) co-existence work towards the long-term goal of enabling emergent cooperation. The research will leverage new geometric tools for environmental decompositions to allow for fast and decentralized decision-making among robots; it will combine this with game theory and nonlinear control to allow the robots to reason about future actions. This project will develop new distributed and decentralized control algorithms with provable properties and demonstrate their performance in simulations and hardware experiments.
Earlier this spring, Pierson received the inaugural MassRobotics Rising Star in Robotics Medal for her key contributions to the cooperative, distributed control of multi-agent teams.
Congratulations to Professors Mancuso, Nia and Pierson!