News in Brief
Goyal Wins NSF Grants
Professor Vivek Goyal was awarded two NSF grants. One award ($240k) will fund research on frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) lidar. Since FMCW lidar's accuracy depends on carefully-calibrated and highly-complex hardware, its cost tends to be high. With the goal of reducing this cost, Goyal and his team plan to break the methodology down to first principles, developing new algorithms and other strategies that can provide accurate distance and velocity measurements with less stringent hardware requirements and, therefore, reduced cost. The other award ($600k) will focus on exploring properties of long-wave infrared (LWIR) light, which lies beyond the visible spectrum and can be useful for surveillance in extreme light conditions. Goyal plans to explore LWIR use in 3D imaging and remote sensing to measure air temperature and composition, with applications for navigation, monitoring pollution, etc., using both learning-based and physics-based approaches.
Symposium on Engineering a Smarter Energy Future
Two MINDS faculty, Professor Emiliano Dall’Anese and Professor Christos Cassandras, are organizing a symposium entitled "A Roadmap for Intelligence and Resilience in Power Grids'' with participation by academia and industry. It will be held on Nov. 14, 2025.
Dall’Anese Wins an NSF Grant
Professor Emiliano Dall’Anese won a $380k NSF grant for project entitled `` Online Optimization of Networked Systems Under Uncertain User Decisions and Responses''. The project's focus is on the design of novel optimization methods required for complex infrastructures under these load conditions. His approach involves the development of algorithms and mathematical strategies which can adapt and account for real-time usage data, competing incentives from different service providers, and other factors, allowing for a responsive and nimble minute-by-minute management of resources to maintain smooth energy distribution. The resulting innovations will have potential applications in other, similarly complex systems, such as transportation networks.
Dall’Anese and Coskun Win an NSF Grant
Professor Emiliano Dall’Anese in collaboration with Professor Ayse Coskun won a $600k NSF award for project entitled ``FlexDC: Flexible Artificial Intelligence Data Centers for Optimized Computing.'' The project focuses on developing a framework to regulate data center power consumption within grid and carbon constraints, while simultaneously providing performance guarantees to users. They plan to achieve this through a combination of planning and runtime optimization policy design, developing a global cost metric, and a variety of methods to address workload properties and constraints (such as parallel applications, job preemption, and other necessary trade-offs). The project will culminate in a prototype process for data centers to perform “flexible computing” as part of emerging smart grid programs.
Venkataraman Wins $3.2M NIH R01 Award
Professor Archana Venkataraman won a $3.2M NIH R01 grant in collaboration with Professor Swathi Kiran in the Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences entitled ``Machine Learning Methods for Predicting Post-Stroke Aphasia and Language Recovery''. This project aims to identify appropriate treatments and provide personalized course-of-recovery predictions for individuals with aphasia (impaired speech after a stroke). Its focus is on developing novel computational models to assist in better understanding the heterogeneous causes and contributing factors behind aphasia, as well as how the condition responds to varied clinical interventions and environmental influences across its diverse presentations and circumstances, using multimodal datasets which include neuroimaging and demographic data.
Batmanghelich Wins NSF CAREER Award
Assistant Professor Kayhan Batmanghelich won an NSF CAREER Award for project entitled "Making Domain-Specific AI Models Steerable by Leveraging Foundational Models". It centers on the development of a new generation of Vision-Language Models (VLLMs), AI systems that combine image analysis with language-based reasoning. These models will be trained with improved “anatomical awareness” and used as “translators” between existing, specialized black-box AI models and clinician-users to diagnose and correct errors through a better understanding of their origins. He joined BU ECE in 2023. Read more on ECE News page.
Ohn-Bar Wins NSF CAREER Award
Assistant Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar won a National Science Foundation CAREER award for project entitled "Advancing AI for Accessibility with User Feedback", which aims to build AI systems that adapt to the experiences of real users, beginning with a focus on low-vision individuals. He joined BU ECE in 2020. Read more on ECE News page.
Batmanghelich Awarded $3.1M by NIH
Our colleague, Assistant Professor Kayhan Batmanghelich, was awarded a $3.1 million competitive renewal R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He will lead transformative research on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) with collaborators from Boston University College of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Read more on ECE News page.
Nawab Receives Teaching Excellence Award
Professor Hamid Nawab has been honored with an inaugural Teaching Excellence in the Core Curriculum Award from the College of Engineering; the sixth teaching award he’s received in almost forty years at BU. This award has been largely a result of glowing comments from students in Computational Linear Algebra students that he recently taught. Read more on ECE News page.
Konrad Elected EURASIP Fellow
Professor Janusz Konrad has been elected to the rank of 2025 Fellow of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) for his “contributions to visual motion analysis and video processing.” Read more on ECE News page.