New AI/ML Awards, from Google to BU ECE
by Kate Seo
Three ECE faculty members were among the first recipients of Google’s inaugural Academic Research Awards (GARA) this fall, recognizing their groundbreaking work in AI and machine learning. The GARA program is Google’s newest initiative to fund research that pushes the boundaries of technological innovation.
Towards decolonizing AI for healthcare
Professor Batmanghelich’s project, titled “Bias Awareness and Mitigation in Breast Cancer Risk Prediction for Marginalized Groups through Participatory AI,” is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon University and Boston University. Professor Batmanghelich, alongside collaborators Professor Clare Poynton (BU Medical) and Motahhare Eslami (CMU), is leveraging recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance breast cancer risk prediction models by addressing biological and demographic biases in AI. This study was awarded $75K in funding under the “Society-Centered AI” category, highlighting research targeted towards needs and challenges faced by diverse global communities, and developing useful and innovative technologies in response.
Debugging the cloud, simplified
Professors Coskun and Stringhini received $100K in funding under the award category “Using Gemini and Google’s open model family to solve systems and infrastructure problems.” Titled “LLM-Based Tracing Management for User-Friendly Performance Analysis in the Cloud,” their project will develop a new system that uses natural language processing and LLMs to simplify the analysis of large distributed system traces, leading to easier debugging and higher resilience, efficiency, and security in complex large-scale systems.
Assistant Professor Kayhan Batmanghelich joined BU ECE in January 2023, with research interests at the intersection of medicine and technology. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and is the founder of READE.ai, a start-up using real-time machine learning to evaluate complications during surgeries, and the co-founder of MLxMed, a virtual seminar series on machine learning practices in healthcare.
Professor Ayse Coskun serves as the Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE), and the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design. She is the recipient of a 2020 IBM Faculty Award (IBM Global University Program Academic Award) and several recent Best Paper Awards, among other honors. Her research interests include computer systems, computer architecture, and energy-efficient computing.
Associate Professor Gianluca Stringhini’s research focuses on cybercrime, system security, malware mitigation, and data-driven approaches to mitigating malicious activity. His work has been supported by various NSF grants and published by top security conferences such as the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the USENIX Security Symposium. He was recently named a 2024 Distinguished Faculty Fellow by the BU College of Engineering.