External Research Partners

CISE faculty collaborate with external research partners to accelerate discovery and innovation.  Center partners share our passion for applying new ways of thinking to solve complex problems. Strategic research collaborations span industry, healthcare, foundations, government, as well as other academic institutions.

Featured partnerships include:

Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE), Professor Christos Cassandras (SE, ECE), and Professor Rebecca Mishuris (BU School of Medicine) have teamed up with Boston Medical Center to develop a health informative system to assist with predicting heart diseases and diabetes. This predictive model, with will be piloted by this team as well, can assist with intervening earlier on and personalizing treatment. This system, based on supervised machine learning techniques, are easier to interpret, have higher predictive power, and can handle more data. Read more about this collaboration here.

Draper, a Cambridge based laboratory, has supported CISE student affiliates through the Draper Scholars (formerly Draper Fellows) program. This program provides M.S. and PhD students with access to Draper facilities, technical advising, and the opportunity to generate prototypes, testbeds, and field implementations of their work. This interdisciplinary laboratory works to develop state-of-the-art technology that serves the nation’s interests and security needs. Draper’s work intersects the government, academia, and industry. The lab’s interests include Autonomous Systems; Position, Navigation, and Timing; Fault-Tolerant Systems; and Secure & Assured Systems.

CISE alumnus Joshua Rapp (PhD ECE 2020, Draper Scholar 2015-2020), advised by Professor Vivek Goyal (ECE), developed and advanced lidar technology with Draper’s support. Rapp’s results were published in Nature Communications and Optica. Robin Dawson, a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Draper, supervised Rapp.

Another CISE student affiliate, Eric Wendel (PhD candidate SE, Draper Scholar 2016-2020) develops algorithms to improve vision-aided navigation with Draper’s support. This technology allows autonomous vehicles to gather and evaluate images from sensors to navigate through an environment. Advised by Professor John Ballieul (SE), Wendel’s research focuses on optimization-based algorithms, which compare various routes to find the optimal direction. Wendel also incorporates ideas from dynamical systems theory, nonlinear optimization, and artificial intelligence in his work.

Professor Christos Cassandras (SE, ECE) has teamed up with Honda to create level five smart cars. Cassandras has developed a series of algorithms that allow smart cars to communicate their speed, acceleration, and location with each other to safely share the road with each other. Currently, Cassandras works with Honda to test his algorithms in their smart cars on the US-33 Smart Corridor highway. Read more about their collaborations here.